It took about a month for me to gather the gear. We started with an IBM PC clone, a massive (by current standards) Verticom color display, a 30 MB hard drive (again, massive by current standards, several WORM (Write-Once-Read Many) optical drives, and a lot of WORM cartridges. This gear was way more expensive than I could afford, but as a writer of books for Microsoft, I had connections with all the companies, and they were willing to loan me the gear for a chance at a favorable review.
While I was accumulating the gear, Scott was working his way through the C++ manual. Scott had severe dyslexia, so reading was difficult for him…but once he read something he pretty much never forgot it. So as the gear started coming in, and his reading progressed, he started roughing code out in his new language. Around the end of January he had all the necessary gear hooked up, and demonstrated his first program that put colored dots on the screen where he wanted them. That doesn’t sound very exciting, but in reality everything about compters was based on putting dots on the screen where you wanted them. So we were happy.