Once upon a time (in high school, so, like 1992) Josh and I had the best idea ever: what if instead of, like, hours and crap, you just divided the day up into 1000 equal segments? Dude, that would be awesome. And completely unoriginal, but you think everything is your idea when you're an ignorant teenager.
Fast-forward a couple of years (1996). I'm working at TSYS, hating my life, and one night K and I are ambling down the walkway which goes along the Chattahoochee and was very nearly the only nice thing about that town. For some reason (was I already working on it???) I have my TI-85 with me, and I finish my first implementation of mclock, the metric timer.
PROGRAM:MCLOCK ClLCD Disp "-----m c l o c k-----" Disp "Enter current time in" Disp "24h format. Hint: add" Disp "15s as a pad." Disp " Input "Current hours:",STDHOUR Input "Current mins.:",STDMINS Input "Current secs.:",STDSECS (STDHOUR*60*60)+(STDMINS*60)+STDSECS->STDSECS STDSECS/86.4->MTIME ClLCD Disp "Current metric time" Disp "is below. Enter it at" Disp "the prompts." Fix 2 Outpt(3,14,MTIME) Float Input "Hundreds digit :" Z4 Input "Tens digit :" Z3 Input "Ones digit :" Z2 Input "Tenths digit :" Z1 Input "Hundredths digit:" Z0 ClLCD Outpt(1,6,"**********") Outpt(2,6,"* mclock *") Outpt(3,6,"**********") Outpt(4,6,"* . *") Outpt(5,6,"**********") Outpt(4,8,Z4) Outpt(4,9,Z3) Outpt(4,10,Z2) Outpt(4,12,Z1) Outpt(4,13,Z0) Outpt(7,1," TI-85 ver. 0.3" Outpt(8,1,"Press a key to quit." While getKy==0 For(TIMR,0,339,1) End If Z0==9 Then Z0=-1 If Z1==9 Then Z1=-1 If Z2==9 Then Z2=-1 If Z3==9 Then Z3=-1 If Z4==9 Then Z4=-1 End Z4+1->Z4 Outpt(4,8,Z4) End Z3+1->Z3 Outpt(4,9,Z3) End Z2+1->Z2 Outpt(4,10,Z2) End Z1+1->Z1 Outpt(4,12,Z1) End Z0+1->Z0 Outpt(4,13,Z0) End ClLCD
I also wrote the obligatory die roller, and apparently started on something called UNICON, whose abortive code bills itself as a "Programmer's Multi Function Converter". It seems to have wanted a decimal integer as input, and would have returned the number in hex and octal plus the ASCII and EBCDIC characters. What was I thinking? Was I seriously planning on embedding 2 whole character sets (I can only assume I was going to pick one of the EBCDICs) in a TI-85 program?
Oh, those were bad days.
