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…
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 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!
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