When I was 12, my parents bought an Osborne 1. I was busy learning how to use all the apps, and one of these was called SuperGraphics by Eric S. Ruff. Dad bough

When I was 12, my parents bought an Osborne 1. I was busy learning how to use all the apps, and one of these was called SuperGraphics by Eric S. Ruff. Dad bought it over snail mail, and it arrived on a 5.25" floppy with a handwritten thank you note. SuperGraphics was a drawing tool, and it had one really neat feature: it could export a BASIC program that would recreate the image you drew. So I loaded up MBASIC, something I wasn't really familiar with, and took a look at the code. It was a whole bunch of POKE statements with hard coded addresses and values. I tried changing some of them and I found that I could get the position and types of characters on the screen to change. Then I started digging into BASIC more, and learned about variables and loops, and then I was able to draw all kinds of stuff! Some short time later, Dad was driving us to church and I remember realizing and saying that I had a lot more fun writing a program to generate an image than I did just using SuperGraphics to draw it. We were driving down Franklin Road, just about to cross highway 99. So thank you, Mr. Ruff, wherever you are, for getting me started down this path.