My first job out of college was at Scion Corporation, who made the MicroAngelo S-100 graphics boards. I did Z80 programming for the firmware. They were nice boards but very expensive so I never got one for myself. The company nearly died when their follow on board for the IBM-PC was a failure, but that's a longer story.
What I liked about those days of computing is that you could invest time in a system and not expect it to be obsolete by the time you felt comfortable with it. And also that you could actually know the whole system. In that sense modern software development is very quick to give you some result but you're building on so many layers of potential trouble that the result never really feels quite as solid and deterministic. Old computers failed because the hardware failed, modern computers fail in weird organic ways when some subsystem far down in the stack temporarily gives out and you'll never know what actually caused the problem.
'Refresh the page' is the modern day equivalent of 'control-alt-delete' from PC era, but before then stuff usually 'just worked' once it worked and it kept on working until the hardware gave out.
I think this is part of what's behind the surge of interest in retrocomputing. As you say, those old 8-bit systems could be understood in their entirety by a single person. I know it's part of what has drawn me into the world of Arduino and other microcontrollers. It's fun to play with a simple system and get instant feedback from a blinky light.
Having said that, 512x480 with non-square pixels is a blight on the Universe.
Was that in / near the University of Maryland in the late 1970's? I was working at a computer store in Rockville as a teenager. Chuck Rieger came in and showed me and the other employees the MicroAngelo. It seemed to be very expensive and very complex, if memory serves me right.
Scion was in Reston, Virginia, but Chuck was a professor at the University of Maryland as well. He eventually quit UMD to work at Scion full time. He's the reason I got the job, he was one of my UMD profs. The MicroAngelo was easy to program but expensive because it was basically a full computer. It had an onboard Z80 and 32K (later 64K) of RAM. I worked there from 1981 to 1983-ish, when they fell on hard times and had to lay a bunch of people off.
I'm immensely interested in the history of computing and computers. If it was ever the case you'd consider being interviewed about your experience (either on this topic, or others-- your HN comment history makes me think you've got a lot of interesting experience) please reach out. I don't know that I'd necessarily want to do the interviewing (it's nothing I've practiced), but I'd definitely try to help facilitate it. These stories are too valuable and interesting not to be told.
