(1980) This is one of the movies that document the early history of the research that resulted in the creation of the EVL Lab.

Tom Defanti presents a demo of the Zgrass paint application for use on the Datamax UV-1.

The basis for the Datamax UV-1 was the GRASS programing language, originally developed by Tom DeFanti for his 1974 Ohio State University Ph.D. thesis.

The GRASS language was further developed into the GRASS3 language that was designed to run on the Z Box. The language then became known a Zgrass.

The Z-Box was a raster graphics machine, unlike the original GRASS systems, so while most of the GRASS3 style was maintained in Zgrass, it added a number of commands dedicated to raster images.