MacPaint source
Apple has donated the the MacPaint source code to the Computer History Museum. Bill Atkinson was responsible for the code, including QuickDraw, which formed a large portion of the MacOS.
A reporter asked Steve Jobs, “How many man-years did it take to write Quick Draw?” Steve asked Bill, who said, “Well, I worked on it on and off for four years.” Steve then told the reporter, “Twenty-four man-years”. Obviously Steve figured, with ample justification, that one Atkinson year was the equivalent of six ordinary programmer years.
The main source is written in Pascal, and is quite beautiful to read — you can tell that he took pride in it. The rest of the code is written in assembler language for the 68000 processor.
3D Mandelbrot
The Mandelbulb is an attempt to create a three dimensional equivalent to the famed Mandelbrot fractal. There’s information about the math behind the Mandelbulb, many images, links to videos and more. If you want the quick version, Wired posted a brief overview and a gallery of images.
Mario AI
Infinite Super Mario AI one of the submissions for the Mario AI competition has been released under a WTFPL license. Make sure to check out the videos.
Apollo 11 source code
The source code for the Command Module and Lunar Module has been scanned and posted online for all to enjoy.
Processing 1.0
Processing is an open source programming language for visual artists, and has recent achieved its 1.0 milestone. Check out the flickr group and OpenProcessing for examples of what you can do with the software.
Computing and the Creative Arts
Computing and the Creative Arts is a new degree being offered by my alma mater that would’ve been right up my alley.
Generative book covers
A behind-the-scenes look at generative book covers for Faber & Faber’s print on demand series. Each cover is unique and generated on the fly using Processing, a language that I need to spend more time with.
