I just ran across an online article about my first IBM PC product called 4-Point Graphics. It was marketed by a company called IMSI out of San Raphael in 1984. The article was written by one of the co-founders, Bob Mayer and here are some highlights:

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4-Point Graphics – really the first painting program for the IBM PC. Able to display 4 colors at a time out of a palette of 16, all at a stunning 320 x 200 pixel resolution. And this was a program that still used the cursor pad to move the cursor around the screen. Computer mice were just in their infancy and we hadn’t yet written an input driver for any of them.

4-Point Graphics quickly became the most popular program that we sold, mainly because there was a dearth of graphics applications for the IBM PC. Its success at retail soon caught the attention of hardware manufacturers, OEMs as we called them. These OEMs were both interested in our writing input and output drivers, as well as supporting their graphics cards; implicit in this support was the potential to have them bundle our software with their hardware products. On the input device side, we were approached by mouse manufacturers such as Logitech and Mouse Systems, a digitizing tablet manufacturer, Kurta, the first color ink jet printer manufacturer, Diablo Systems (a Xerox company), and a ‘graphics’ oriented computer manufacturer called Mindscape.

One of the biggest challenges we faced in closing these deals, was that our ‘team’ of people responsible for selling and supporting these OEMS was not exactly a polished, professional group.

4-Point Graphics' Product Manager, Dusty P, was a professional astrologist who dressed and looked like someone from the Haight Ashbury in San Francisco. Our OEM sales manager, Alan K., while looking and dressing fairly conservatively, had big drinking and cocaine issues. Finally, the programmer of 4-Point Graphics, Jim H., never went to sleep before 3am and when he did wake up, began his day with a joint or two.

Naturally these personalities presented challenges to morning meetings with the more conservative manufacturers such as Xerox and NCR. Alan would often attend the meetings with his wrap-around sunglasses still on, Dusty would weave references to the position of the moon and stars into his comments about the program, and Jim, if he actually showed up for the meeting, was usually too stoned to say much of anything at these meetings, so would just sit there and smile.

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Here you go :-)

Some art from the program:

And a couple other things I created back then: