The History of Swinth - by Sung J. Woo
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The History of Swinth<br>The graphics were cool, but the tunes? It didn’t seem possible that such lush music could come out of a Commodore 64.
Sung J. Woo<br>Aug 13, 2026
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Enjoy this guest post from Sung J. Woo! — Paul
Do you remember Swinth? That may not be the filename you typed to load it and run it – the copy I have on my floppy is from 1988, and it is misspelled: SNYTH. But it runs just the same.
Light Fantastic was another name Swinth went by, and it is an apt descriptor, though a better one might have been Music and Light Fantastic, because as impressive as its proto-screensaver graphics were, the music is what people still talk about to this day.
An easter egg exists if you type LIST before running it, displaying the people responsible for this landmark demo. Glen E. Bredon created Swish, the graphics portion. Jim Winings uploaded the music. Carl A. Meahl Jr. figured out how to put the two programs together.
Note that a significant name is missing, that of the composer of Synth Sample.<br>Through the vagaries of the internet, I was able to track down Carl “Butch” Meahl, Swinth’s author, and the composer of the wondrous music, too: Georg Feil. Dr. Bredon and Jim Winings are unfortunately no longer with us.<br>Subscribe for free to Goto 10 to get more retro computing articles like this sent straight to your Inbox for easy reading.
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Here now is the story of Swinth from its living creators, in their own words.<br>Georg Feil, author of Synth Sample: My twin brother Max and I got our C64 at the end of 1982. I remember seeing the famous Christmas Demo in the store. But we had owned a PET computer for a few years so we knew and loved Commodore computers already.<br>I started developing Synth, which was used to create Synth Sample, in 1983, so 43 years ago. I’m 62 now but still play keyboards around various venues in Toronto in my band. My goal in 1983 was to make my computer play some of the music I really loved, like Vangelis. I was not a musician but fortunately making Synth led to a part-time career in bands and music. I had actually attempted making music on my PET computer a couple years earlier. I wrote a program called Composer, but with no SID chip it could play only one note at a time and I realized this was too limited. Another important goal for Synth was to be able to export the music and “attach” it to other programs easily, so that game developers could use it as a music and sound-effects workstation then integrate the results into their game.<br>Butch Meahl, author of Swinth: Well, I had just gotten out of the Navy. And in the Navy, my last tour of duty was in Millington, Tennessee as an instructor. I taught machine language in the Navy “A” schools, and I was in the computer lab. That’s where I got my start with actual machine language and processors. The first thing I did was buy a Commodore 64.<br>The first program I bought was the Macro Assembler Development System. Then I signed up with CompuServe, an old bulletin board at the time. And I started downloading programs and disassembling how they worked.<br>One of the programs was Synth Sample. It was a program that ran in the background so you were able to run other programs in the foreground. While that music was playing, I got on CompuServe and browsed around and downloaded other things.<br>A few months later, Swish came out.<br>Cameron Kaiser and Matthew W. Miller, via comp.sys.cbm on July 26-27, 2000: I read in comp.sys.apple2 that Glen Bredon died. He was the author of, among other things, the Swish demo that was eventually incorporated into Swinth, and tons of other utility programs for both the C64/128 and Apple II systems. Originally, Swish was included with Merlin 128 and was a demo of a fast line-drawing routine he had developed.<br>Terry Winings, younger brother of Jim Winings who uploaded Synth Sample to CompuServe: Jim lived in Ft. Lauderdale and I lived in Chicago then. He had a software company he called Winning Edge Software. We both worked for Motorola then and they had a quality improvement initiative they called “First time yield.” Jim’s program was to measure that. I believe he may have sold it to a couple of companies. It didn’t go much beyond that, but he had great hopes. He had a Commodore 64 and IBM compatible PC. He would have been thrilled to know someone was interested in his efforts.<br>Georg: I didn’t know Jim Winings. My brother and I were at University of Waterloo, in residence. There was a lot of file sharing going on in residence, students with C64s became friends and would visit each other’s rooms with floppy disks. After I made Synth Sample I gave it to a friend in residence named Paul Kellam. He was an expert C64 coder and hacker and probably had a lot of contacts through his game hacking activities. He was particularly interested in C64 music, and later even “commissioned” me to create a Synth song for him – the Hogan’s Heroes...