J. Peterson's Writing About Electronics, Reviews, 3D Modeling, etc.

Tag Archives: Mac

Highs and Lows from Mid-70s Computing

June 29, 2026 – 4:01 pm

I’m reviewing two books here with their origins in the mid-1970s microcomputer revolution:

These two companies – Apple and Sphere – started at around the same time with similar products. Yet the two corporate histories are quite a contrast. Apple is a wild success, becoming one of the largest companies on the planet. Sphere vanished with barely a trace, just a couple years after its founding. Yet, these two stories originating from the dawn of the microprocessor have remarkable connections.

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Mac Software Lives Again

May 2, 2022 – 9:02 pm

Back in the mid/late 1980s I wrote a couple of cool (to me at least) Macintosh Applications.

Macintosh Pico

This is an image processing language demo based Gerard Holzmann’s book Beyond Photography – The Digital Darkroom. The app lets you interactively type expressions in Holzmann’s language and see the results in another window.

Wallpaper for the Mind

This app creates chaotic patterns based on a formula published in Scientific American‘s Computer Recreations column. You can vary the formula’s parameters and instantly see the effects on the pattern, as well as zoom and pan around the results.

These were both implemented as fun demos. Neither app had much in the way of commercial potential, so I gave them away for free. Both were originally written to run on 68K Macintoshes running System 7, typical of the late-80s. Read on to learn about their new lease on life.

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