In 1980 Bridges started his programming career at the NYU Institute for Reconstructive Plastic Surgery as a summer intern, working with sophisticated programmable vector graphics systems.
He wrote editing tools and also updated and debugged software used for early 3D x-ray scanning research.
During his tenure there he created a drawing program called SuperDraw for CCM, and on his own wrote the core graphics code for what would later become PCPaint, as well as develop the GRASP GL library format.
Bridges' work on GRASP included several toolsets and add-ons, such as Pictor Paint, ARTools, HRFE (High Res Flic Enhancement),[2] and PC Speaker sound code that caused Paul Mace Software to be threatened with a lawsuit by RealSound because of the use of frequency modulation, upon which RealSound held a patent.
A stripped-down version of GRASP 4.0 was also included with copies of Philip Shaddock's Multimedia Creations: Hands-On Workshop for Exploring Animation and Sound.
Not only did it play full color video at such an early date in DOS history, but it did so smoothly on one of the slowest, most low-end IBM PS/2 models sold.
Those same algorithms were later published in an article by Bridges entitled "Differential Image Compression", which first appeared in Dr. Dobb's Journal in February 1991.
VGAKIT is an open source library for accessing extended graphics modes from DOS, which was not standardized before VESA VBE arrived.
"[12] Author Michael Abrash, in his 1997 book Graphics Programming Black Book, says "Little other than my DDJ (Dr. Dobb's Journal) columns has been published about (Mode X), although Bridges has widely distributed his code for a number of undocumented 256-color resolutions, and I’d like to acknowledge the influence of his code on the mode set routine presented in [Chapter 47].