I still to this day write programs for my TI-83 to simplify tasks. I used to write games for them a few years ago, and they actually ended up getting circulated fairly well. I think a lot of people would write them on the computer and then use some software to get the programs on to the calculators. I wrote them in the calculator themselves, which took a lot more time. Maybe if I had been able to do it on the computer, I would have written more complicated games.

That being said, I already knew how to program computers in a couple languages when I started writing programs for the calculator. I don't know that this is the case with most people who program their calculators, in fact I doubt that it is, but it certainly does happen in some cases--for example, I really don't think the people who write complicated games and sophisticated programs for their calculators don't have some prior experience in programming computers. Simple programs like finding the slope of a line after entering two ordered pairs, however, probably doesn't come from prior programming experience.