Art a la Albers; a short program to simulate the work of an abstract colorist. (Josef Albers) Michael Crichton.

The characteristic image of artist Josef Albers was three overlapping squares, usually drawn in close or contrasting colors. The image is easy to recreate on a computer, but the appropriate interplay of color in the squares is not.

However, the text mode of the IBM PC does allow for subtle color contrasts. The short program in Listing 1 provides many beautiful combinations. There are two things to bear in mind while keying it in: first, lines such as 80 are created by holding down the Alt key while typing the number 176 on the numeric keypad--that is, pressing the End key, the Home key, and the right cursor key. And second, if while debugging you lose your text entirely, you can always get it back by typing COLOR 7,8 in direct mode.

If you wish Albers to turn over in his grave, make these changes: 40 FOR D= 1 TO 7 : FOR A= 14 TO 25 290 COLOR C, C- 13: FOR Y= 11 TO 17

This will cause some of the images to flash.

A more appropriate change involves repeating the instruction lines that draw the three squares, but with different graphics characters, after line 320. There are many ways to do this. It's fun to experiment.