Screensavers

While I consulted for Mark Williams Company in 1993, I wrote a screensaver called mwclogo. It displayed the company logo, a strikingly simple and beautiful interlacing of the letters 'M' and 'W' as seen at left, on a then state-of-the-art VGA 640x480 screen in 8-bit color. It picked random color schemes (two colors per screen, letters and background) and random transitions between successive screens (wipes, dissolves, etc.). It looked great. I'm a Frank Stella fan, especially of his big bright geometric paintings, so I used the same graphics library and transitions library for another screensaver called Stella, as seen at right.

My original C code was for the Mark Williams COHERENT operating system, but it ported easily to MS-DOS, so it ran on both. A tarball of my venerable C sources from 1993-1994 is here. Almost 15 years later, the 1996-vintage MS-DOS binaries mwclogo.exe and Stella.exe still work on a Windows PC, as seen in these screenshots. These programs grab the entire screen when they start; hit <Esc> or 'q' to quit.

When I wrote this page, I ported some of my old C code to PHP GD. Click here to display the Mark Williams logo as a .png image, or here to display one of the Stellas. You can twiddle the parameters to change the size and padding of the image, or hit your browser's reload button to change the colors. A few more PHP images are here.

Someday I'll port these screensavers to Java, but don't hold your breath.

Click on any image to enlarge, then use the back arrow on your browser to return.