Screensavers Before Windows | Nostalgia Nerd
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- Опубликовано: 18 июл 2017
- Time for the short history of screensavers... What was the first screensaver? How does screen burn occur? What did those bizarre people who used MSDOS (like me) do to prevent their screens from being burnt into an uncivilised hell? Well, all those answers and more (probably) lay in wait. In this video I'll be looking at the early days of screensavers, and in particular MS-DOS screensavers. After a brief look at the history of screensavers and their first "mention" in the 1961 novel, Stranger in the Strange Land, we get stuck in at the deep end with such creations as;
Plasma, BugFry, Aquarium, EYE, Rain, Tunnel, VGAGlow, Screamer, Fire, Bushsave, Inner Mission, Fantasy, Snow, DCMatrix, Night Bird, Sparkwood, DSDino and of course, After Dark for DOS.
So sit back, safe in the knowledge, that your screen will be safe from burning during the next 10 minutes or so (unless you have terrible internet and the buffering logo gets burnt on - but that's your problem, not mine).
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Of course, the original screensaver I didn't mention here was, turning your monitor off when you leave your desk.... But where's the fun in that?
That's not a screensaver, it's saving the screen.
Razzle Dazzle? Voodoo Lights?
Does acid warp count?
Eiozen Thomas yea acid warp used to run on my HP 200lx
Who remembers ACIDWARP.EXE ???
When I was a kid I found a program my father made in the mid to late 80's on his IBM PC of just lines rotating on the screen. He explained that he worked at a hospital and TV screens with Dr's names on them were everywhere and a lot of them were also permanently burned. He thought his line program could save the hospital thousands of dollars in TV replacement costs. Forward thinking guy.
In Windows 3.1 I found I could edit the win.ini file and make the screensaver any .exe I wanted, and also change the wait time to as low as 1 second. I had the school computers opening up a new instance of calculator or notepad every second, until they covered the screen :D The computer teacher was baffled and kept trying to close each one. Every time he paused to think about how to solve it, a new notepad would open lol
Discern4 Haha!, I wish I could do goofy shit like that!, sadly i am 12 and was born in the 21st century.
But then again i can write a VBscript and mess in different ways.
You can also make those .ini files read-only, so if they do change them, and apply the changes they just get ignored and go back to the settings on disk. I had high score in minesweeper for a whole semester... Though I probably shouldn't have used my real name... The librarian was pissed...
@@Lee-mv3im Google "task scheduler" ... ;-)
Hacker voice: I am in
Wow so evil 😂
My favorite part of retro channels is when they cover the little things that most people wouldn't bother to spend serious time on. Sometimes the mundane details are the things that people remember the most, and it's all worth preserving.
The very first CRT dates back to the late 1800s but it wasn't used as a display yet. It was used by J.J Thomson in his experiments to verify that cathode rays are made of electrons.
Well yes actually, we all used to have in out living rooms a similar device to the one used to demonstrate the existence and properties of electrons.
Holy shit... and here I am thinking I'm oldschool with my memories of old screensavers like "pipes", "3D Maze", Those trippy effects from that Windows 98 Plus! disc, and "That Cube thing that protrudes spikes every now and then"....
...
Growing up in the 90s was weird.
Faze of 1337planet that maze was weird. You forgot marquee!
Faze of 1337planet what about the space one
I think I had 5 or 6 variations of that "flying through space" screensaver on the PC that I had when I was a kid. I think one of them I found was a 3rd party one that had flying pigs. Anybody remember that one? I dont even know if some of those 3rd party screensavers even exist anymore or if they are actually compatible with operating systems newer then 98.
Also Mystify and Beziers just came to mind, and the Windows 98 one that re-assembles the desktop screenshot in some funky isometric pattern. That was some good early 2000s shit right there... including the Plus! ones. :)
Heh, marquee was also classic. Can type whatever you want in any colour of the 256 colour rainbow. You want bright purple text scrolling on a lime green background? Sure why the hell not? lol
I remember the haunted house one from the Plus! stuff. That and the "Golden Age" one spooked me a bit as a kid.
Memories
I wrote a few DOS screensavers in QBasic when I was in highschool. Now I kind of wish I still had them.
Why not try writing some new ones if you still remember QBASIC.
Or even if you dont! QBasic is easy to pick back up.
me too ;-) BUT i have them all on a old backup CD
I did too. I think mine was very CPU intensive!
Try QB64. It's pretty cool. Almost all the old QB, with a bunch of new stuff added.
Robert A Heinlein was born in my hometown of Butler, Missouri! My social studies teacher lived in his old house. Heinlein is pretty much that town's only claim to fame other than the "worlds smallest tombstone". haha
Butler has the WORLD'S ONLY BRONZE STATUE OF AN AFRICAN AMERICAN UNION SOLDIER guarding it's town square. That's something. I even stood 8 hour watches over him when Antifa/BLM promised to pull it down.
When I was a kid in the 80s and 90s almost all the arcade games had burn in. With Donkey Kong in particular, you could see the "game over" and "insert coin" text burnt into the crt.
My favorite Screensaver of Windows 95 was a maze where you'd see an occasional rat
When I saw the title, I had to come make sure Atari 8 bit 'attract mode' got proper mention and was pleased to see it did!
my movie theater has a pacman cabinet with the game over screen burned in
pacman
I remember seeing Sega Rally cabinets years ago with "4 PLAYER RACING!" permanently seared into the middle of the screen, probably because that message is shown statically on top of nearly the entire attract cycle.
@@dwarfbunni Pac-Man
My grand father used to own like 3 tvs like that, he used to own an arcade business.
Worked at a local TV station, we had a remote camera feeding the transmitter temperatures because the actual remote sensing had broken. It was displayed on a 4" ( or were they 5" ?) Sony B&W monitor. Had been up for so many years that when we switched transmitter towers the screen was so badly burned in everyone thought it was still on. There were weeks of logged temperature reports kept until someone noticed the monitor was off.
I thought screensavers were obsolete...
But AMOLED displays proved me wrong.
Unfortunately most such displays are on phones whose operating systems were not designed with any considerations at all for burn-in.
The more things change, the more they stay the same, huh.
Except... All the old techniques are since forgotten.
Anyway, if you have any plasma or OLED displays, remember burn-in does still happen on those.
And it's as annoying as it's ever been
The trouble with OLED specifically is that each sub-pixel loses brightness over time depending on how long it has been switched on.
Not only does this result in uneven brightness over time, but since, like pretty much all displays, it has individual RGB sub-pixels, over time parts of the screen can not only develop brightness inconsistencies, but those inconsistencies can cause a coloured tint related to which colours were displayed the most on that part of the screen.
In other words, quite visible burn-in.
This colour shift tendency is made worse because the effective lifespan and the rate of decay for the red, green and blue elements is inconsistent, and thus wear out unevenly.
+KuraIthys Wow, that goes a long way towards explaining why OLED displays haven't totally conquered the smartphone and computer display world; I remember back when they were first introduced and everyone was talking about how awesome they were...
I wrote a "turn screen off TSR" but that only worked on certain screen cards (I think), so the next was a character based that displayed a "spaceship" jumping around on a variable star field. Extremely boring but we actually used it at work for a few years. Then we invented the "anti screen saver". A new CRT smelled awful for some time, it had to gas off some flame retarders. So we left it on after work but then a screen saver kicked in (I do not recall why we could not disable that) and the CRT got cold. So we devised a mouse attached to an oscillating office fan with a paper clip so that the mouse kept mowing around and the screen saver never kicked in.
I have a little tungsten weight that I can place on my otherwise-useless scroll lock key in order to prevent the screen from sleeping.
Fun fact: Despite the lack of screensaver support in Windows 3.0, you can grab the blank screen saver from Windows 3.1, rename the extension to .exe, and it will run on Windows 3.0.
OMG, 'Plasma' brings back memories! I used to use that ALL the time on my systems back when I had a 486/66 (didn't look all that great and was slow~ish) in '94 and then a P2/400 in '97...
Funny story about 'Fire'...in 2000, I had a temp job at an office of a prestigious porcelain figurine manufacture in NJ as an admin assistant and later B2B customer service and I came across 'Fire' during that time and was enamored with it at home (where I still had my P2/400, briefly with it's original Rendition-based Diamond Stealth S220 and two 3dfx Voodoo2-based Diamond Monster 3D-2s in SLI before going over to the new Geforce2MX a few months later...damn those were the days!). Not being business network savvy yet, I thought that this would be an awesome thing to put on my co-workers machines! They'd love it! And most of them, 20 and 30-something working married women, indeed, did get a kick out of it.
Who *didn't* like it, I very soon found out, was the IT department and their head of security. I'd made a major no-no by installing unknown, 'public', untested (by them) software on corporate systems that, had it been infected, could have brought the whole network down. Later that afternoon, after a mandatory two hour lunch where half the customer service department had to sit gossiping while their machines were 'refreshed' and reconfigured, I was marched into my supervisors office, along with my temp company rep, and given a stern talking to. They acknowledged my 'enthusiasm' for wanting to share with colleagues and my technical skills in installing it without help from IT but was told in no uncertain terms that if it ever happened again, I'd be terminated on the spot and the cost of fixing the problem would be taken from my pay to cover it, along with a negative review permanently attached to my temp record with my current company. (Which wasn't *that* big a deal since I had four temp agencies working for me finding potential jobs but I got their point pretty clearly)
It was embarrassing at the time, especially when I had to do the 'walk of shame' through the customer service department after the meeting to get back to my cubicle but I laugh at it now. Ah, good times...good times...
Amazingly enough, even after this, or maybe because of it, I was only the second person in all of the customer service departments to be trained with working on the new SAP version for Windows2000, which had both just been released a few months earlier. The only other one that was trained that early was the head of my particular department (which, confusingly, wasn't my direct supervisor). I remember being very grateful for the opportunity, yet somewhat confused, since I was only a temp. I learned quite a bit about both SAP and Win2000 and still have the SAP manual (that's bigger than a phone book) somewhere. Sadly, not three months later, all temp workers were let go, including myself, during a 'restructuring'. It turned out to be one of my favorite jobs ever.
My CRT actually has a burned image in it, not of anything in particular, but because someone had done a really poor job adjusting the display size and shape on the monitor and left it fucked up, for what I assume was ages, it was still in that configuration when I bought it. I almost immediately rectified that, but on a black screen you can still see where the old screen image was, lower and off set.
My uncles monitor had horrendous phosphor burn.... Of the sodding windows 95 haunted house screensaver!
What's the point of a screensaver if you get the screensaver image burnt into the monitor?
Screamer sounds like if Techmoan were recorded the "scream"
On a plastic cup.
Grammar dies, interesting aquarium.
Omg I was thinking the same thing...even the plastic cup part. hahaha!
Wow ! I came across your video that highlights the many pre-windows screensavers, including VGAGLOW that I programmed in 1993 and posted on our local BBS. Thank you for adding a smile to my day. - jht
"After all, the contrast of bright text on a dark backdrop is a stark contrast"
10/10 scriptwriting dood haha
Sato Glad you noticed. 10/10
Hes not wrong
These videos of yours make me feel all warm and "at home" feeling. Thank you.
I have fond memories of my father's Star Trek screen saver. You could watch the bridge of the enterprise and its encounters, Scotty doing repairs in the Jeffery's tube, the horta mineing through your desktop, and Spock shooting holes, speaking Vulcan proverbs, and playing the harp. I must've spent hours watching it in the early 90's.
After Dark! We had the same one!
There were screensavers long before DOS, like "Fishies" on the Apple 2! It put an aquarium scene on the monitor when the computer was not in use.
This, like so many of your videos, is surprisingly interesting. Thank you very much.
by the way: OLED screens have a similar problem of images burning in. The (sub)pixels that get used more than others, will eventually be darker than the rest of the screen as they lose the initial LED brightness level sooner.
Ya i learned that the hard way, i watched too much youtube on my last phone it burned in the top portion where the video plays differently than the mostly white part below that. Thats why i always use dark mode now
Afterdark inspired me to force a live chicken into a Toastmaster 1B9.
Oh man, I remember Plasma. I still have it on a floppy somewhere. It was odd though. On some systems it wouldn't animate after the screen was rendered, it would simply remain a static screen for a few moments before rendering a new one. While on others it animated like in the video.
OMG, that Flying Toaster sound! 😁👍
Man those Flying Toasters take me back!
I love screen savers, and still use one on my Windows 10 triple 24in 1080P 60hz monitor setup called Electric Sheep as it's one of the few I've been able to find that works properly across multiple monitors, and it for sure produces some really wild effects.
I've been looking for that "Aquarium" program for AGES!! :D Could never find it since I didn't know the developer, and my search attempts were littered with hundreds of other aquarium screensavers. Thank you so much for featuring it in this video.
I used to have flying toaster one on my 386 PC...all those memories!!! Thanks Nostalgia Nerd you're the best!!!
"Fantasy" looks like something I accidentally coded when I was learning QBasic in 2005. I did manage to make a working QB-Paint program with mouse support, fun language really opened my eyes.
Edit: oh man and at the end "Conways game of life" that was fun coding in java ❤
This channel is fantastic, so glad i found it.
I created screensavers for DOS that ran on 286 machines. I was amazed it worked.
You really need to get "After Dark Twisted". It has flying toilets with a person sitting on it and all such weird stuff.
When talking about DOS I met screen savers first with the built-in norton commander screen savers. I think there was some choice and I liked their fish saver the most. Win only came later so I associate savers with NC :-)
Oh and I remember having the plasma stuff with color palette cycling - it looked awsome!
Yeah, while I have plasma, I never used it but I did get use of NC's screensaver.
Heh, I actually still have that Plasma program in a directory full of old DOS stuff I've somehow carried from computer to computer. Along with Tran's various screen savers like Timeless and Ambience. Good times.
Epic video! I have never seen any of those. I didnt experience screen savers until Windows 95. I was a huge fan of 3D Maze and 3D Pipes at that time, until I fell in love with Bubbles on Vista.
I had Tunnel and Plasma on my first PC! (Packard Bell 386) Thanks for posting this, it really takes me back.
The first screensaver I remember was this wierd 3d maze type screensaver .. it looked like a game really!
You are SO close to the magic 100k subscribers (from one of your patreons :) )
Bah gawd... Rain, Tunnel, and Plasma - three DOS programs that I specifically remember. Especially tunnel, I could stare at that for... well, probably minutes at least. I have these backed up somewhere in a directory called "EYECANDY".
My personal favorite was Acid Warp by Noah Spurrier. Didn't realize that After Dark had been made for DOS, though, as that is my all time favorite screen saver.
I'm glad you've acknowledge the Atari 8-bit screensaver, Nerd. I still remember the command used to prevent it happening in a running program: POKE 77,0
Poke 77,0 eh, thanks, I might use that on my 800.
ahah - one of the very first bits of software that i made, after pong was a screen saver for my father at work with a bunch of tiny blue nun sprites (like a hundred or so) bouncing around the screen :) . Thanks to the magic of * -1.
It was actually used ! :)
what "*-1" stands for?
multiply by minus one - to reverse the direction of travel.
Lol. that brings back memories. You could easily cheat in games too if they didnt do a saniytu check on the number like buying -99 potions. hahahaa
This reminded me of when I used to live and code in DOS. I came up with starfield, fire, plasma, TV snow, snow with gravity and many other screensavers in the 90's using Borland Turbo Pascal on 8086s up to 80486s. :)
James Wade so nice ! could you share the source if you'd be so kind :)
Sorry, not happening. :)
Now I'm REALLY excited!
I want a biscuit!
What do you want, a cookie?
i never understood the fascination of flying toasters back then
i remember my brother in law bringing over after dark for windows
and showing me the flying toasters like it was something special lol
TFTs may not be as susceptible to screen burn but they can still get it. I once came across a TFT screen that had been used by a building receptionist at Cadburys (The UK Chocolate Company). A screensaver had never been used across the monitor's "career" and the desktop background had the Cadburys Logo in purple against a dark background... for 7 years. You could see the Cadburys logo positively burnt onto the screen, even when the monitor was switched off!
Awesome video, Wheres Acidwarp.exe? Man the memories are huge in this one.. Loved it.
The whole point of a screensaver is to have no static elements on the screen that would cause burn-in. Some of these are an example of failure at life.
I remember Dazzle which had most of those older style screen savers all in one. They were setup as scenes and it would just pick a random one every 20 seconds or so. Great firework effects as well.
can't wait for part 2!
I'm glad I watched till the end because I was going to call you out on not including Flying Toasters, LOL!
I'd forgotten all about After Dark! The bouncing balls and the toasters especially. Daredevil Dan is my absolute favorite screensaver from that era!
I actually remember the Plasma one on my Amiga. We also had a version of After Dark as well. And I actually programmed (In Basic) one that was much like the rain one. It didn't have the VGA colors of the PC one (It was only a 4 color basic after all) and was just a stand alone program and not a screen saver, but it was my first attempt at programming and it actually worked. :)
"Rain" reminds me of Scorched Earth. Anyone remember that gem?
+marty slackjaw I certainly do. "Scorched Earth: The Mother of all Games". I used to play that on my boss's 25 Mhz 386 system with Windows 3.1 on it back in the mid 90s. It was really neat how you could customize the text that was showed when tanks fired or were destroyed. I also remember a bunch of the weapons (the MIRV, Baby Nuke, Ball of Dirt, the Roller, etc). Later on a 3D version was made but I never messed with it. Of course now they have realistic tank warfare games like World of Tanks.
yes, and Worms could be seen as its succesor
I always had a soft spot in my heart for Starry Night from After Dark. Still have it on my PC at work.
We had one of those CRT from 80's at our shop years ago. It was one of those amber on black ones. This thing had its spreadsheet burned on screen permanently. Years after being decommissioned and unplugged you still could view without any problems its last display.
Omg! My grandpa had that aquarium screensaver on his computer! That was fun seeing that. He had this “food fight” screen saver that I have never been able to find again. I am not ever sure of the name. It would take a still of the current screen and food would start falling onto the screen and splattering. I can’t remember what food but like eggs and pizza and everything. I need to find it. It has to be out there somewhere!
Woah. I didn't know After Dark was available for DOS! That's great. I'll have to go hunt down a copy now. (I have all of the AD versions for both Mac and Windows, but never knew about DOS.)
The first screensaver I can clearly remember was "Johnny Castaway" (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Castaway).
I must've been 10 or 11 at the time, and although I'm sure I must've seen some screensaver or another before that, this is the first one I have a clear recollection of. I remember me and my sister (at times accompanied by our mother and father) marvelling at the computer screen which had suddenly become some sort of cartoon! We could sit for hours looking at Johnny and antics!
I also have vivid memories of turning it on one Christmas morning and finding that Johnny was trying to celebrate Christmas too, something that brought the rest of the family to the screen as well. I mean; It was one thing that he had his daily routines (by this time we'd picked up on the fact that the screensaver was on a bit of a loop) but him being sensitive to the fact that it was Christmas morning? In my mind, that was something else! The illusion of him being almost real, however, was dispelled a month or so later when my dad broke the news that we could get him to celebrate Christmas whenever we liked if we just changed the date on the computer.....
EDIT: So I wrote this before watching the video proper. And now it occurs to me that I *DO* remember that early scrnsave.com screensaver. It also turns out that my memory's been wrong all this time since I distinctly remembered Johnny Castaway being an msDos application...
holy shit thats a lot of forgotten memories..
thank you so much.
I'm not sure if it was a DOS or Windows screensaver, but I always loved Johnny Castaway. I've watched that thing for hours to see what new would happen to poor Johnny.
Oh man I remember having that plasma screensaver on my computer!
This is awesome. I remember some of these. I want to go back in time and bring with me my i7 7700k Titan XP machine. Now that would probably blow some hats off.
XP on a last gen machine? Such a waste. There are technologies in your CPU XP can not manage adequately, or at all. You're getting the same performance you'd get with an older/cheaper CPU.
Have very fond memories of AcidWarp.. not sure if it can be really classed as a screensaver though... man I spent hours watching that. :)
Don't stress flying toasters are last
When we upgraded from our old Macintosh Plus to a Dell 486 running Windows 3.1, my parents got me the After Dark Star Trek screensaver! I loved that thing! My parents hated the ones with sound lol so it stayed mostly on ion storm, but it had the giant brain cells, spock, Kirk the horta, nomad...
What a great video. lThank you.
“Razzle Dazzle”. I worked in IT in a college where one Professor couldn’t get the colours quite right when displaying through his IBM M-Motion adapter. I expended HOURS and DAYS over WEEKS calling IBM and RazzleDazzle tech support and doing trial-and-error with different video modes and settings. UGGHH!
I'm surprised that "Timeless" didn't make your list. I watched that screensaver for hours. 😃
I remember screensavers that you could download for PDA devices. Not that you needed it, but it was fun to stare at while you were in class and suppose to be using it as a caculator.
I remember actually having After Dark for Windows. It came with a hot pink writing pen with flying toasters all over it for filling out the registration card, which I never got around to doing. :)
I'm pretty sure you featured it in the video intro, but I'm surprised you didn't mention Dazzle. I can watch that for hours. I showed it to a friend on LSD and he freaked out.
What was the one called that had drawn coloured pipes that connected in a 3D type fashion?
3D Pipes.
LOL
I think he might have been a Windows 3.1 screen saver, maybe DOS, but in the very early 90s I recall Sierra's Johnny Castaway being a fun screen saver you could waste a lot of time staring at. Over the course of a few years, I even managed to see him get rescued a few times.
We spend hours and hours with my schoolfriend customizing "Aquarium" on her dad's work PC. Did'nt even have a computer at home back then, so the excitement was INTENSE :D
i had a ati tv wonder!!! man what a gift that was
Trance inducing huh? To me it would be more like epilepsy triggering. Great Video.
Jeeeez nooooo, I can still remember these 🙀
I remembered from the 98 Plus! screensavers, which were also present on XP! Pipes and Maze were THE THING to me when I started to use computers! hahah
acidwarp & dazzle were always my favorites :)
My first PC was a Windows 98, but later on I got the 2nd edition Windows 98, you know the one, it had loads of really awesome themes, each one with its own animated screensaver, some of which even had sound! I'd spend hours and hours going through them all when I was little, my favourite was the space one, it was great!
It wasn't "a Windows 98". it was a PC running Windows 98... And the themes you describe are part of the Plus! pack, not Windows 98 SE.
Subscribed! Another epic and well presented episode. Subscribed!
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I feel this is going to be an important history lesson to show kids in the future! Yes kids.. even BEFORE things ere displayed floating in the air,even before interactive reality telecast technology, things were displayed on real screens..and things had to move ever so often to prevent the surface staying that way.
Seriously , look how far we have come in such a short slice of time. Who knows where AI, AR, VR etc. is heading.. display technology is becoming unrecognisably futuristic and is forever evolving.
"LinusTechTips" channel just reviewed a Dell 8K monitor and tried some video editing and games on it.. For once in their entire history, GPUs are falling behind in powering the display technology! The display port socket can't even pump enough pixels yet to properly display certain everything with the right FPS or colour gamut.Even the latest release of Windows struggled in some way.
So, anyway, this reminded me.. There is a screen saver that I've been looking for for 25 years now :(
My dad used to work at a computer company (around 30 years ago) TNow, I know that they did use Sun UltraSparc workstations - not sure what OS they were using, but my dad claimed to have put a screensaver on a floppy disk and brought it home for me. It worked on my Windows 3.11 machine.. so either he got it from an IBM compatible computer they had - or screensavers work across Sun and Windows machines.
The screensaver was simple, it filled the entire screen with a texture of a flag that simply cycled through the colour pallet so it would look like the flag was waving - there was also a tube you looked down that did the same thing. The flag texture was a grid, so each colour moved to its adjacent neighbour as it cycled to give the illusion of movement.
Hope that makes sense. I could probablt draw a picture if needed.. but I don't know what I would do if I actually found that screen saver again.. hit the ceiling then break down in tears!? A quarter of a century searching!!
(I wish their was a screen saver museum! Even if you couldn't download them, it would be great just to see a few frames of old screensavers and bring back some memories - I could probably find the once I've been looking for too!)
It's actually strange that static screens could burn in patterns of it on your monitor because those lightbeams has the stantstandly move from left to right from top to bothum all the time, so it never can focus it's light at once spot,but that refreshing just happens sooo fast enough that the light can focus itself on one point to cause burn in,yes likehow our eyes just sees an entire image.
Atari heavily emphasized the screensaver feature in their early advertising, because in the 1970s people had gotten burn-in from simple Pong consoles connected to their TVs and there were a lot of warnings going around about how video games could ruin your TV. (Keep in mind, TVs cost a lot in those days--they were often one of the most expensive home appliances people owned.) They needed to convince parents whose kids were begging for a console that that wasn't going to happen.
WOW that took me back....I just downloaded the latest Aquarium SS....thought it was great back then, now I hope its awesome, I am about to find out
OMG it's Effing awesome... you got to see it
Just bought it for £16
The first screen saver I remember seeing was on a Novel Netware server console. It was just plain 80x25 text mode and put a block that bounced around the screen, with a tail of lighter colored blocks following it.
Nice, those were proper screen savers. I kind of miss the screensaver. These days the screen just turns off.
Oh man that Life screensaver looked *sweet!* I never knew After Dark had Conway's GoL on it. I had some sort of version of After Dark as far as I recall, but don't really remember much about it.
Very interesting videos and channel. Right up my street - instant sub.
I remember seeing a 2nd hand monitor with so much burn in you could tell which building society it used to belong to when it was turned off.
spankeyfish
ATMs also get screen burn
Remember Johnny Castaway Screensaver? I could watch his antics for hours...
The one I used was the color changing line that bounces around the screen leaving trails of old lines...I think it was called mosaic or mystique or something similar.
My favorite screen saver was one that was able to lock the keyboard and basically was a Windows XP app crash, BSOD and reboot (all disguised under a scren saver). Don't remember how it was coded to lock the keyboard, but I remember it activated once during a class discussion and the instructor freaked out. Sad thing I found later is it was a practical prank played on one instructor by another (all in good fun) but the IT staff re-imaged the hard drive three times, and he sneaked it onto the computer each time. I remember the IT guy later saying he never could figure out what was causing the BSOD...
I had one that drew stuff on your screen, and was quite interesting. I wish I remembered what it was called. I think it came with a program for making your own greeting cards.