Ya I'm positive it was a Mac Plus form factor and not an Apple ][ (cool brackets btw, very nostalgic). And 90% sure that the drawing program was MacPaint, although I can't explain why I remember it being in color.
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While I'm here, I want to link back to an earlier comment I made about synesthesia where patterns look like colors:
I think this mechanism was at play because I had never seen a dot matrix black and white display before, and thought that the Mac OS checkerboard gray pattern was especially cool. I distinctly remember one of the darker gray patterns appearing blue. So I wonder if my mind filled in the pink/red like in the Coke image. The brick wall and roof tile patterns also stirred my imagination, perhaps triggering a feeling of red.
I think most people with sight have rod cells which are sensitive to cyan, so I've always wondered if a negative afterimage in low light could simulate red for people with varying degrees of color blindness, technically color shiftedness, since they can see colors like gold/khaki that people with ordinary vision can't see but only see as a secondary mix of red and green light making yellow:
Unfortunately Google broke their search engine so we can't link directly to images anymore, a 1000th reason why it maybe shouldn't exist as a company anymore due to its recent behavior, but I digress:
I also had dozens of concussions growing up feral in the 80s, and I think that may have exacerbated my neurodivergency and ADHD symptoms, giving me endless curiosity. I stumbled onto an article the other day about shroom microdosing possibly regrowing connections between brain cells to treat traumatic brain injury, similar to this one:
So I wonder if psychedelics and exercises to train the visual cortex to discern colors better, combined with various medications that might slightly shift the opsin receptor frequencies in the eye, could improve color discernment for some people.
As I've gotten older, I've come to realize that our memories and perception of reality itself can change over time, because everything we perceive is actually in our minds. So for example, I had forgotten about the Mac Plus for 30-40 years, but now the memory is more vivid because it's connected to recent thoughts through time.
It's going to be weird in 10-20 years when something like Neuralink allows us to see without using our eyes. I suspect that we will discover new colors in the ultraviolet and infrared range that birds and insects see that we haven't seen before, as well as new impossible colors like green plus magenta/purple making octarine, the color of magic:
