About us
Stay in touch
A version of the GRASS animation language, developed in 1978 by Tom DeFanti, Jamie Fenton and Nola Donato for an affordable home computer built around the Bally Arcade's Z80 chip. Chicago artists such as Jane Veeder and Copper Giloth worked with it.
The Zgrass was built on the hardware of the Bally Arcade, the same system Dave Nutting Associates used to develop several Bally/Midway games. Tom DeFanti at EVL took that machine, added memory and a keyboard, and ported his GRASS language from the PDP-11 to create Zgrass, named for its Z80 processor.
Copper Giloth, Jane Veeder on Loving Change
Everything we'd been doing on the Zgrass machines up to that point was four-color, all of Jane's work and all of mine, except my very earliest piece, Skippy Peanut Butter Jars, which was two.
Copper Giloth, Jane Veeder on Loving Change