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…
An homage to Tom Dowdy's 1991 screensaver, "Kaos" launched on February 6, 2025 with 153 votes, #257 of 5,999 launches that month and more than 95% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 1 year on.
In plain words
This is an animated recreation of Tom Dowdy's 1991 "Kaos" screensaver, which creates intricate webs of algorithmic patterns from simple colored dots. The creator reverse-engineered the original program and added animation, cycling through lines with spaced pixels and iterating to draw progressively fainter points around lit areas. Clicking freezes frames that often resemble Dowdy's original static images. It's designed for anyone nostalgic for classic Mac screensavers or interested in algorithmic generative art.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
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…
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