[kfogel]

Jim Blandy wrote a similar program for X Windows around 1992: a beautiful color clock that would sit on your desktop's root windown and slowly cycle through the colors over the course of an hour. It didn't even show digits -- you just had to learn the colors :-). I think it depended on X supporting writeable color cells, though, so it would need to be rewritten to work on most modern systems (which generally seem to not be set up that way).

  http://svn.red-bean.com/repos/circles/trunk/

Hmm, but that's after I started making some mods. For best results, try an earlier rev (this was converted from CVS, hence the weird log message):

  http://viewvc.red-bean.com/circles/trunk/?pathrev=3