You should definitely read about @nina_kali_nina 's project to reverse engineer #VisiOn and produce the first ever (published) 3rd party application for the platform. It's a massively impressive piece of work, even by the already high standards of the #retrocomputing community. Her notes are available at https://git.sr.ht/~nkali/vision-sdk/tree/main/note/index.md.

A few notes on why I think this is important. Firstly, I don't think you can really understand any field without understanding its history, and I think software engineering is especially bad at this. We tend to dismiss anything more than a couple of years old as irrelevant, which is why we're constantly reinventing the wheel and have people who don't realise that you can build a web page without using a JavaScript framework. One of the nice things about historical software is that you can actually use it, and take it apart and modify it, which leads to a much deeper understanding than you'd get from just reading about how it was used.

1/n