[BushCountry]

“I was also a CP/M programmer...”

That’s pretty cool and a good history lesson for me. I think I read that MS copied CP/M API (look and feel) and that is why I thought they stole a lot of the internal code.

Never much of a programmer except for HTML / CSS / Java. More hardware and electronics. But I made some mean batch files in the day. I miss them.

[Myrddin]

I didn't have much money in the early 80s, so my H8 grew a board at a time. I had just started work at PacBell and my coffee buddies were Apple II owners. When the Lisa came out, I was impressed with the capability, but it was way beyond my budget. I took a trip to San Jose and purchased a simple graphics card that I could interface to the H8 bus. Straight device access at the register level and NTSC output. No software. I purchased a C compiler from The Software Toolworks for $80 and purchased the Foley and Van Dam graphics book (in C). Inside of a week, I was able to plot a 3D (X, Y, Z-axis depth) mathematical function. A Polaroid camera snapshot of the green only monochrome screen served as the literal screen shot. A couple years later, the UseNIX conference (Baltimore?) took pictures of the attendees and saved a good gray scale file of the picture. It was necessary to write a raster rendering application to covert the file to a viewable image. It worked. Not near as convenient as the graphics files we have today.