What is Kaleidoscope?
This archive is a a testament to user customisation, a love letter to creativity. From it's inception personal computers have been seen as an extension of ourselves, Lidlicker's Man-Computer Symbiosis. The GUI desktop a digital manifestation of the the desk top.
Before the monitor stand took pride of place on the desk top, it was a place for objects whose purpose was intrinsic to the object rather than referential. Pens in a mug from the kitchen. Notebooks and sticky notes, with ideas to change the world. Works in progress, works completed. No two desk tops the same. An analogue of the mind that used it.
When the desk top contracted to become the desktop, it started off static. You couldn't choose the colour of pens you wanted, or where to put your papers but it was the first time in the man-computer symbiosis that the desktop begun to resemble the desk top.
Then in a streak of colour, the desktop became personal. Suddenly you could choose the colour of your pens again. Kaleidoscope gave you the freedom to radicalise your desktop, move away from what it's designers had intended and put you in creative control. Want to make your desktop completely unusable by hiding all window decoration so you can't click anything? Be our guest. Maybe BeOS had the right idea for it's User Interface? Then steal that!
This was Kaleidoscope.
It wasn't the first to do so, but it is emblematic of the time.
Kaleidoscope is a third party theme manager for System 7 and Mac OS 8, written by Arlo Rose and Greg Landweber. It utilizes a proprietary framework to apply "schemes" to the Macintosh GUI, long before Apple released the Appearance Manager system with Mac OS 8 (later updated in Mac OS 8.5, providing similar functionality using "themes"). Whereas only a few Appearance Manager themes were ever developed, tens of thousands of Kaleidoscope schemes were developed.
— Wikipedia, Kaleidoscope (software)
Those glory days are over (until the year of the Linux desktop). Now we are shackled to our mega-corp provided desktops, and aside from moving a couple of icons, you will eat your slop and like it.
So take this archive I have put together as a point of solace, a shrine to what we have lost along the way.
I took every sit archive on the WayBack machine I could find. I've expanded them all, applied the schemes, screenshot and cropped the images and delivered it to you here.
Thanks to a handful of python scripts, this was an easy process. Most of it was automated, and KSA Sampler provided us with the preview windows similar to what was shown on the Kaleidoscope website.
If you have any schemes not in the archive feel free to submit them. Wikiepedia says there was over 10,000 we have just under half that at the moment.
I hope you enjoy.