If you owned a Commodore 64 back in the early to mid-1980s, it’s entirely possible you spent some time looking and listening to the demo below.
SWINTH was its name, and I came to it later, around 1988, which I know for a fact because I still have a floppy disk that has the file, and amidst that program are my sophomore high school documents! On 3/9/1988, for Period 11, I wrote a “current events” assignment for Social Studies about Krabbe disease (was this really the best I could do?).
Anyway, I have always been fascinated by this program, because it’s both a screensaver (anyone remember Mystify back in ancient Windows 3.1?) and an incredible showcase for C64’s SID, the venerable sound chip. And last year, I somehow got into my head that I wanted to find the people who made it.
It took months — months! I kid you not. And for the first time in my life, I felt like a real journalist, if not a detective. I emailed, DMed, LinkedIn Messaged utter strangers who were wives, friends, children of the creators I was desperately trying to locate. I scoured ancestry sites that were both life-based (i.e., family trees) and academic (i.e., professors and their advisees), I sifted through obituaries and Internet Archives. And after all that searching, I found two of the four, as the other two had passed away.
My goal for this article was to create an “oral history” style of interviews, where it almost feels like all the interviewees are in the same room even though they were interviewed separately. The first book of this kind I encountered was Legs McNeil’s The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry, which I used to write my second novel. A more popular work that utilized the same technique is Live from New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live by Tom Shales and James A. Miller; the “More Cowbell” history is so good!
Long story short, this took a while, and I’m very proud of it. For those who know and love SWINTH, I think you’ll get a kick out of it. And for those who have never heard of it, you are about to embark upon a bit of computer history as it was made, over at GOTO 10.
I was not aware of SWINTH, but this is a terrific oral history. I can appreciate what went into it, having spent an inordinate amount of time programming some of my piano music into my TRS-80.