                            BIO.TXT

My name is James Lehman. I've lived all my life in Northeast Ohio.
Sometime in 1981 I purchased a kit from an electronics magazine add.
For $80 I got a computer - The Sinclair ZX-81. Since then, I've been 
fascinated with mathematically generated graphics. All the while I
used various computers to do this, I was limited by the predefined
graphics commands available on whatever system I used. After exhausting
my reach with MS Qbasic on an IBM compatible, I still had no convenient
way to permanently create full color images that could be manipulated or
printed within a graphics editor. I did however learn a lot of sneaky,
yet very tedious, tricks, like; running Qbasic in Windows and using 
the "Print Screen" key to capture a VGA display, then using Paintbrush
to paste together multiple screens to make one large continuous bitmap.
This bitmap would be only 16 colors, unless 3 different, yet related,
screens were captured, one for each of the red, green, and blue color
plains, and combined in an image editor that has this ability. Yuk!
There had to be a better way. I went looking for this "Holy Grail" of
graphics programming on various BBSs and found nothing, except a few
applications that are able to save their own images to disk files.
I also looked into some advanced languages, which is how I came across
CA-Realizer. Still, I was unsatisfied with their graphics handling
capabilities. A couple years ago, a good friend of mine suggested that I
just decode the BMP file format and learn how to create and control disk
files from within my own programs. Sure, no problem. Needless to say, I had
a lot to learn. But, happily, I did figure it out, and in such a way as
to make it simple to write multitudes of graphics programs with ease and
total control. So, If you are like me, and you like to express yourself
artistically with sines, cosines, powers, and roots, exploring the endless
patterns and textures of "Mathemagic Land", this is all for you.
