View Image

Zen is cute. Zen is fun. Zen application was developed to be a simple tool that you can put in your computer's Startup folder, or just run it whenever you want.

What Zen does is search several text files of "fortune cookie" sayings, and display one at random. The fortune cookie files are just plain text; you can use your favorite text editor application to edit them file to include whatever pithy pearls of wisdom you like. Each message can be as long as you want; the messages are separated with two RETURN characters. A large collection of fortune cookie files is available for download from this site.

Zen was inspired by the program "COOKIE," first written in FORTRAN for PDP computers back in the day, and since then ported to almost every computer and operating system on earth. (I myself wrote a version of Cookie for the DECsystem-20 back in 1984, and for the TRS-80 in 1985.) Zen is very simple; on launch, it scans the ZEN.TXT file and chooses one of the entries at random. The "AGAIN" button chooses a different random fortune; the QUIT button quits.