In the late 80's/early 90's I worked for a tiny company called Alpha Products/Colorware. We built I/O hardware and sold a Color Computer drawing program called

In the late 80's/early 90's I worked for a tiny company called Alpha Products/Colorware. We built I/O hardware and sold a Color Computer drawing program called CoCoMax. CoCoMax was written by an outside programmer who approached us to see if we wanted to sell it for him. He would go on to make tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in royalties over time. He also designed and sold (on his own) a CoCo3-based Genlocking video manipulator whose name escapes me, but it was well known in the video industry since competitive products cost 10x what his did. I hear that with that product he went from collecting cars to collecting airplanes :-) The final version of CoCoMax for the Color Computer 3 was such an obvious ripoff of MacPaint that the owner of Alpha sat me down in front of a PC with a photocopied MacPaint manual and said "copy this manual but make it different enough so it's not obvious we copied it." BTW, our word processor was XYWrite if anyone remembers it :-) We sold analog and digital I/O boards but at that time there was no obvious "winner" out of all the computers on the market. As a result, the company had its own I/O bus that these boards were based on. For each computer -- Apple ][, TRS80, IBM, etc., we sold an adapter that would convert that computer's external bus interface to our proprietary interface. So we had a line of boards with a single interface and you'd select an adapter depending on what computer you had. By 1990 or so it was obvious that 90% of our customers were using IBM/ISA bus machines, but by keeping with our proprietary bus we actually avoided having to compete too directly with other companies making the same kind of hardware but designed specifically for the ISA bus. Around 1992, I think, we dropped the "Colorware" part of the name as the TRS80 software had dropped off to a trickle.