10 PRINT

“10 PRINT” is a sort of Hello, world in the generative arts world. I somehow was unaware of it even though I spent a bit of time building demos on the Commodore 64; probably this was because I learned BASIC on the Apple II where it wasn’t as commonly referenced.

But later in life I started following the work of Casey Reas and he frequently starts introductory lectures with a reference to it, with truchet tiling as a natural visualization. So when I wanted to try authoring a PICO-8 cartridge, it was natural to draw up a simple truchet sprite and write 18 lines of code in honor of this famous one-liner.

And six years after building this, I have discovered that the original After Dark screensaver collection incuded a saver named “TacTiles” that look exactly like this. I didn’t discover After Dark until version 3.0, so don’t think I’d ever seen it. Perhaps I saw it somewhere, but I think it’s just obvious enough to have been “invented” many times.