CYANOTYPE
BLUEPRINT DESKTOP
Written gratefully by Swift Griggs.
Elizabeth is a multi-talented artist. The fine art in Cyanotype (the wallpapers) is exclusively her original artwork. The color theory code for CySchemeD is based on her ideas. In addition, hundreds of detailed bug reports, and refactored visual and application behavior in Cyanotype apps, have come from her reviews and critiques, which continue to be invaluable. Elizabeth started on the IBM PCjr as a kid and taught herself to program at age five, the same year as she taught herself to read. She was an SGI desktop user in the early 2000s as well. She has a degree in Fine Arts and thousands of original physical/traditional art pieces, as well as hundreds of thousands of art assets and digital designs. The icosahedron logo at the top and bottom of this site is her edit, made in The Gimp.
Camille is a local musician with more than 15 years of experience, and a friend of the project. She donated upwards of 100 cues, recorded live, and she is the performer on one of our demo songs, "Sun on the Wire".
Mike is a drummer with decades of experience, in multiple bands and as an instructor. He donated dozens of cues and performed two drum solos written by the AI composer, Mina Quill. You hear his samples in the CySoundD cues and on multiple promotional materials. All of it was recorded live on acoustic drums.
Darlene is a pianist with decades of experience and advanced music studies, classically trained as a concert pianist, with many past performances. She contributed more than 100 cues and is the live performer for "Kitchen Window", a solo piece used in multiple promotional videos.
And finally, myself.
I started this project in 2007, after the bankruptcy of Silicon Graphics. I've been an SGI hardware collector since 1998, when I bought my first SGI from Greg Douglas at Reputable Systems in Golden, CO. I'm an enthusiastic SGI collector and programmer, with several decades of *nix bona fides. I started programming at six years old on a Timex Sinclair 1000, with a 16K RAM expansion pack held on with rubber bands. Moved to the MOS 6502, then the lovely Motorola 68k on Amigas and Atari STs, MIPS, then the unfortunate halls of the x86/x86_64.
The original concept was to recreate, at a minimum, a 4Dwm clone and an 'fm' workalike. I saw the MAXX Desktop and I was very impressed, but I've got a different take on the idea. I basically want to keep working on something very similar to Indigo Magic Desktop, but with a BSD license, a fresh codebase, and the right to continue doing what SGI could not, post bankruptcy. The idea then would be to march on, replacing one SGI app at a time with a workalike built on my own code. SGI lives on in my vintage retro fantasy. It's actually fun, usable, and full of rich media and features, on a light C99-coded diet. That idea is now fully real in Cyanotype, and it is being refined continually by someone willing to put both time and a little money into this volunteer project.
At the time, work as a systems engineer ate most of my coding time, and I could not make enough headway. I had a 4Dwm hack made from MWM code, and I managed to get a library to parse Fluxbox configs nicely. I had some hinting and Xlib code that could draw Motif-alike windows faster than Motif. Much of that code I kept, and it is still in the project. I created a build framework based on a regular Bourne shell script. That also survives to this day. I also wrote a ton of design specs which, as it turned out, were solid gold once LLM coding worked better than my code (early 2026), and was also quicker at walking a spec and scaffolding code. SGI wrote a great deal about their design, too. When I picked the project back up in early July 2026, LLMs helped me make rapid progress while I steered, tested, and code-reviewed heavily, consumed tokens, and refactored and audited constantly. That produced the Halloween 2026 v1.0 release, with much more to come at a nice pace.
I own and test on five SGI workstations, including a 400 MHz R12000 O2 and a fully working 4x800 MHz R16000 Tezro, loaded with hardware and RAM. The Tezro is the main workstation. These machines get used hard in the development of Cyanotype, as reference workstations and as CI testing targets. I also develop on NetBSD AMD64 quite often, an Ultra 60 running 32-bit Solaris 8, a Sun T5240 running Solaris 10, a V125 running Solaris 9, an IBM 43P with AIX 4.3, an IBM IntelliStation 9111-285 running AIX 6.1, an SGI R5000 Indy, several Core 2-era ThinkPads, and a partridge in a pear tree of about 30 LXC Linux containers and 3 or 4 rando BSD virtual machines.
I've written device drivers, student-project microkernels, side-scrolling intro loaders, simple unreleased window managers, BBSes, and MS-DOS programs galore (tons of Borland Turbo C), garbage web apps, but most of all a metric ton of *nix C tools and utilities, as a systems engineer for IBM, Oracle, and PARSEC. Sadly, never SGI directly.
Cyanotype Project. Blueprint Desktop. BSD 2-clause.
Not affiliated with Silicon Graphics. SGI, IRIX, and Indigo Magic
belong to their owners. 1.0 is aimed at 31 October 2026.