Pixie Scheme

Pixie Scheme:

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, I released several versions of Pixie Scheme for Apple Macintoshes™ of the era. My more recent implementations, including Wraith Scheme, Pixie Scheme II and Pixie Scheme III, are direct descendents of Pixie Scheme, and share much of Pixie Scheme’s source code. The January, 1991 release of Pixie Scheme was the last release of the original Pixie Scheme. It only runs on “24-bit” Macintoshes, with operating system versions around 6 or 7. (If you do not know what a “24-bit” Macintosh is, consider yourself fortunate.) To download a disk image of the release, click this link: Pixie Scheme, Jan. 1991.dmg. I have also provided an on-line PDF version of the “READ_THIS_FIRST” file for the release, which goes into some details about the limitations of this very old software.

The release comprises the Pixie Scheme application, some text files, and a folder with a few short samples of Scheme code. There is a help file — well, sort of: It’s a HyperCard™ stack. (I miss HyperCard.) There is no source code for the application itself. Pixie Scheme is shareware.

I do not have a screen shot for Pixie Scheme. The icon is a tolerable stylized representation of what cat Pixie actually looked like.

I decided to make this venerable distribution available because I have read that there are people who collect and use old Macintoshes: Appropriate software must be scarce and difficult to locate. I myself no longer have any old Macintosh hardware or software, so there will probably be no further releases of Pixie Scheme.

Pixie Scheme II and Pixie Scheme III are very much reincarnations of the original Pixie Scheme. The user interfaces are quite similar, and a great part of the source code for these applications (and for Wraith Scheme as well) is identical to the corresponding source code for the original Pixie Scheme.

Known serious bugs in Pixie Scheme: None known at present. And I regret to say, that if there are any, there is almost certainly nothing that I can do to fix them.