TI99ers Hall of Fame - Jacques Groslouis

In October of 2003, Jacques Groslouis wrote that the TI99 community was in need of a hall of fame as a permanent place to honor and record outstanding achievements and contributions and that he was willing to work with interested TI99ers to reach that goal. After five months of discussions and planning with fellow TI99ers, the "TI99ers Hall of Fame", creation of the Board of Governors and guidelines and rules for nominating, voting, and induction were established. Finally, the overall "Governance Rules and Regulations", for the TI99ers Hall of Fame, was adopted by the Board of Governors on March 7, 2004 and the TI99ers Hall of Fame site was located at www.ti99hof.org. The first inductees into the TI99ers Hall of Fame were Art Green, Lee Kitchens, MICROpendium, Beery Miller, Jim Peterson and Lou Phillips.

Jacques led the planning and operation of the TI99ers Hall of Fame from its inception until his passing on September 30, 2014. It was through Jacques' vision and leadership that the TI99ers Hall of Fame became the international site for recognizing outstanding TI-99/4A and Myarc "Geneve" 9640 home computer users and user groups, as well as supporting services and publications, whose achievements and contributions for the TI99 community were of great and lasting value.

Jacques was also known, in the international TI99 community, for his willingness and ability to share his extensive knowledge of TI-99/4A history, operations and advancements via the great number of articles he authored and with all who contacted him with specific questions regarding the TI-99/4A and/or Myarc "Geneve" 9640 systems. Jacques' knowledgeable guidance and friendly demeanor will always be fondly remembered by those who benefited from their communications with him.

In addition to sharing knowledge and being helpful to others, Jacques wrote programs and articles for the TI-99/4A. He also was a tireless proofreader of documents for the TI-CYC disk. (A DVD archive of TI-99/4A related material such as books, magazines, articles, and other documents) Some programs Jacques wrote are a TI version of Sudoku, an Olympic Games program, and a program called Frustrate. He converted such games as "The Labyrinth Inferno", "Al Capone", and "Ti-Sweeper" to work with Extended Basic on the TI. He wrote several articles for MICROpendium Magazine, such as "Getting more out of Funnelweb with an Horizon Ramdisk", and " Arranger program manipulates columns in TI-Writer files". Some other MICROpendium articles by Jacques are titled "More on the MICROpendium Index", "Using TI-Artist with Funnelweb Editor 5.0", "What's There"(an Extended Basic disassembler) and "Getting more out of Funnelweb with an Horizon Ramdisk." Jacques worked on a program to take BASIC or XB programs and convert them to C99. Later on, Jacques wrote the article "Getting There From Here", about connecting the TI to modern computers, and "Using RANDOMIZE with seeds" on September 20, 2009. He was very knowledgeable about FunnelWeb and wrote an article about that computer environment. He also wrote a series of error corrections and notes for use with the TI-99 Assembly Language book, "Introduction to Assembly Language on the TI Home Computer" by Ralph Molesworth.

In 2012, Jacques was awarded the Jim Peterson Lifetime Achievement Award in recognition "For decades of sharing his invaluable knowledge with TI99ers everywhere and his leadership and organizational ability in founding and administering the TI99ers Hall of Fame."

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In recognition of his leadership and the sharing of his vast knowledge, Jacques Groslouis was posthumously inducted into the TI99ers Hall of Fame on December 13, 2014.

Note: The following was written by Jacques in 1998.
"In December 1982 I decided to buy a TI-99/4A for our children together with a few game modules. We typed in a few simple programs which we saved on our cassette recorder. It was not until most of my children had left home that I decided to add a PEB and to seriously learn how to program in Extended Basic. I have also dabbled a bit in assembly, c99 and other languages supported by the TI-99/4A, but am most comfortable with XBasic. I am a subscriber to MICROpendium and over the years have been newsletter member of a number of user groups in the US and Canada. I scrounge used book stores and have collected a good number of books written for the TI.

My interest in programming, although self-taught, continues and I find that I am always trying to write programs which make it easier to use existing TI programs. A few have appeared in MICROpendium. A project which I have been working on for a number of years is a program which converts Basic tokens into c99 source code. I do not expect that this will ever convert all Basic or XBasic programs but I have had some success with simpler programs. Although slow because it is written in Xbasic it produces c99 source code faster than I can write c99 code. My TI-99/4A continues to provide me with enough of a challenge and looks after most of my computing needs."

Note: The following was from Jacques' published obituary.
Jacques was born in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada in 1935. "Jack", as Jacques was known by family and friends, was a retired partner from KPMG with 54 years of service, was elected a fellow of the New Brunswick Institute of Chartered Accountants, past president of the NBICA, life member of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Ontario, a Junior Achievement Advisor, past Treasurer of the Bathurst Rotary Club and a Paul Harris Award recipient.