Show HN: An homage to Tom Dowdy's 1991 screensaver, "Kaos"

So, I was about 11 years old and just got my first Mac, a IIsi, and of course everyone had AfterDark, but there was this other screensaver program called "Dark Side of the Mac". And within it was, I think now, the most beautiful screensaver ever written. It was called Kaos.

Kaos would take anywhere from 10 to 30 seconds to slowly iterate on a single image, starting with a few colored dots and growing into webs within webs of algorithmic beauty.

I'm not sure how Tom Dowdy actually wrote the program. What I've done here is to try to reverse engineer how it might have worked, but to animate it at the same time.

Freezing a frame (by clicking) seems to often yield something close to the original. My method is to cycle between 1 and 30 lines, with spaced out pixels, and then iterate the whole buffer to draw fainter and fainter points within a radius from any point that's already lit, while also amplifying the ones that were lit before and shifting their colors slightly at the same time.

Anyway, I did this tonight but I've been thinking about it for weeks, so, I hope someone enjoys it. Cheers!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42963346

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# Comments: 21

https://thestrikeagency.com/kaos/