Chasing the "Color Eater"
Mar. 3rd, 2014 08:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerBYTE was around for a good while so far as computer magazines go, from the days of enthusiasts soldering together their own microcomputer kits to at least the first years of "official web sites." The influence that longevity built up might be reflected in some small part in how I noticed scanned versions of its early issues online earlier than with certain other "multi-system" magazines, and those scans are still higher quality than some of those that showed up later. BYTE did have a reputation for being technical and "high-level," though, and I have to admit a lot of what was in it seems to go over my own head, and I do seem to prefer reading some of those other magazines. There have been things I've found in the issues I've looked at that have interested me, though, and sometimes it's the little things that most catch my attention.
One page near the beginning of the April 1977 issue promised that next month's issue would have an article by Steve Wozniak on his design of the Apple II, which the magazine's editor Carl Helmers suggested might be the first "appliance computer." In relating how Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs had shown a prototype to him, he suggested they write a "Color Eater" program for it, taking the idea from a demonstation he'd seen "in an advanced graphics research laboratory in 1975". The three of them wrote the program in the Apple II's original "Integer BASIC" in half to three quarters of an hour (although with the conventional wisdom nowadays it's easy to suppose Jobs was kibitzing as "Woz" and Helmers did the actual work), and the preview was illustrated with a screen shot of the program running on the computer's low-resolution, 16-colour mode. It looked more jumbled than the symmetrical kaleidoscopes and "random line" programs I'd found on disk images and tried on Apple II emulators, but there seemed more substance to its globs and shards of colour than a "random point" program might produce. That eventually started me thinking.
Although no "type-in program" was provided, Helmers seemed to give just enough description of how the program worked to make me think I might try writing something like it myself. A bit of mulling over the "clockwise search" he said the "Color Eater" did to find "its current 'digestible' color" and looking into a reference document (also scanned in) to find the command to read screen colours came up with a program typed into one of my emulators, although one rife with "GOTO" statements, which as we all know are "considered harmful." In any case, too give the "Color Eater" something to start snacking on I decided to fill the screen with "random points" and see how it evolved, but once it was running it didn't seem to evolve very fast. When I tried cutting back on the starting chaos all the way to a blank screen, I wound up convinced the "Color Eater" would eat its way into completely "digested" surroundings sooner rather than later and not be able to find anything near it to devour except its own tracks. Stepping past the thought of the program only starting on a random point, though, made things start to look just a bit more like the screen shot.
Even if it's harder than it might seem to come up with exactly what was shown all those years, though, there's something to the search and coming up with new ideas. I still have a few more of them to try out with the program, and that in the end might be more what the BASIC language was meant to encourage.
One page near the beginning of the April 1977 issue promised that next month's issue would have an article by Steve Wozniak on his design of the Apple II, which the magazine's editor Carl Helmers suggested might be the first "appliance computer." In relating how Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs had shown a prototype to him, he suggested they write a "Color Eater" program for it, taking the idea from a demonstation he'd seen "in an advanced graphics research laboratory in 1975". The three of them wrote the program in the Apple II's original "Integer BASIC" in half to three quarters of an hour (although with the conventional wisdom nowadays it's easy to suppose Jobs was kibitzing as "Woz" and Helmers did the actual work), and the preview was illustrated with a screen shot of the program running on the computer's low-resolution, 16-colour mode. It looked more jumbled than the symmetrical kaleidoscopes and "random line" programs I'd found on disk images and tried on Apple II emulators, but there seemed more substance to its globs and shards of colour than a "random point" program might produce. That eventually started me thinking.
Although no "type-in program" was provided, Helmers seemed to give just enough description of how the program worked to make me think I might try writing something like it myself. A bit of mulling over the "clockwise search" he said the "Color Eater" did to find "its current 'digestible' color" and looking into a reference document (also scanned in) to find the command to read screen colours came up with a program typed into one of my emulators, although one rife with "GOTO" statements, which as we all know are "considered harmful." In any case, too give the "Color Eater" something to start snacking on I decided to fill the screen with "random points" and see how it evolved, but once it was running it didn't seem to evolve very fast. When I tried cutting back on the starting chaos all the way to a blank screen, I wound up convinced the "Color Eater" would eat its way into completely "digested" surroundings sooner rather than later and not be able to find anything near it to devour except its own tracks. Stepping past the thought of the program only starting on a random point, though, made things start to look just a bit more like the screen shot.
Even if it's harder than it might seem to come up with exactly what was shown all those years, though, there's something to the search and coming up with new ideas. I still have a few more of them to try out with the program, and that in the end might be more what the BASIC language was meant to encourage.