FWIW, I wrote a graphing menuing system with primitive scalable fonts (for Arabic) in Turbo Pascal in '89 on US taxpayer dimes for live variable twiddling graphing of demographic simulations. It was all roll our own back then on 512K PC's. I implemented a Common Lisp compiler packaged in a DLL for Windows before the net took off. Some kind of "hardware and syscalls up" exercise should be part of more CS programs. It is a great experience to engineer truly reusable (and reused) code before the mosh pits of corporate labors. Good times make for useful memories.