Screensaver nostalgia 🖥️

This is a popular topic on Antenna. I mentioned elsewhere that I worked on character-mode UIs that got burned into screens. That wasn't nice. When GUIs became a thing I never saw screen burn, but we all had screensavers any way.

I remember hacking a specific byte in the MS "Skulls" screensaver so that the Wingdings character of my choice would fly towards me. And I once wrote one (in Visual Basic!) that displayed a countdown to a date of your choice. It bounced around the screen in a fairly dull way.

My favourite one came from a cover disk from some magazine. It was called Ants and it started with a screenshot of whatever you were doing. Then a few invisible ants wandered around messing with pixels. The path they took was partly random, and partly determined by the pixels that they encountered. Sometimes you got a fairly straight section, then it would ramble around the widgets in a dialog. Occasionally one would build a strange angular spiral around itself. You could just sit and watch, and it was a shame to have to stop it and do some work.

Second favourite was "Pipes" because occasionally there'd be a teapot. Much more fun than it sounds, honest.

And we really did install pointless toys from dubious sources on our work computers without bad things happenning because it was a innocent time when everyone was friendly. And crypto mining botnets hadn't been invented. I do remember someone getting in trouble for running SETI-at-home at work though. That ran as a screensaver.

I've noticed that screensavers still come in a few Linux distros. I just looked, and Windows still has them, though well hidden. Perhaps because the setp dialog is the same as it was decades ago.

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