- Image Viewers on CP/M (techtinkering.com)
CP/M is by default a text-only affair. However, many of the machines that can run CP/M have hardware that would allow them to display graphics. As BBSing started to grow so too did the distribution of electronic images in formats such as: .RLE, .PCX, .GIF and .BMP. Therefore, programs were written on popular CP/M machines to display these pictures. Each program was hardware dependant because there were no standard operating system calls to interact with the graphics hardware. There was GSX-80, but you still needed a hardware dependant screen driver for each machine and not that many machines had them, plus it was pretty slow. There were also programs that printed the image to a printer rather than display on screen. This was particularly useful for those machines that didn’t have sufficient graphical hardware or a version couldn’t be found or adapted for them.