Relive the joy of Berkeley Systems' famous "Flying Toasters" and other “After Dark” screensavers

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Originally published at: Relive the joy of Berkeley Systems' famous "Flying Toasters" and other "After Dark" screensavers | Boing Boing

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Screens not burning in any more may contribute :slight_smile:

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But can you play Lunatic Fringe is my question.

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And sleep mode.

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Yes.

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Laptops also contribute. Back in the 90’s you didn’t close your computer when you were done with it.

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I’ve been using the same Sheep vs Gravity screensaver for 20 years. These days I have it set to turn on ten minutes before my laptop enters sleep mode, as a visual cue for myself.

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Screen saver wars.

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I thought most/all still do, it just takes a lot of exposure to get LCDs to burn in (OLEDs I think are not a whole lot better then CRTs in this regards, and plasma is at least as bad as CRTs ever were what with sort of being a whole lot of tiny CRTs…).

I mean you are still right, if it takes an order of magnitude more exposure to the same images to burn in many people won’t experience burn in with normal usage until long after they want to replace the monitor with a newer bigger one anyway.

I think they are still popular, but not so much as a independent category of software. OSes come with bundled screen savers. Largely not as cool as flying toasters, but for sure good enough to get the job done.

So similar to the death of calendar applications, and the in-progress-death of note taking applications: why buy what you already own?

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OLED definitely has burn in risk but panel makers have various mitigations in place to try to prevent this. (Shifting the picture a couple of px every so often, adjusting the brightness of areas where there’s static images, automated pixel refreshing when turned off, etc.) In most cases it’s a non issue.

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What they say. LED screens take a lot more time to burn through. Effectively that eliminated the need for screensavers. The main continuing need is for business security, so that unattended screens have a password requirement to be accessed. Business screensavers tend to be boring commercial images. I’ve created a few screensavers in my time. My favourite was a Peacock Butterfly that would flutter around the screen, settle for ten seconds or so, and then flutter around again. My second favourite was a set of four images of concentric rings, in different colours. They would drift around the screen and bounce off the screen edges. As they overlapped, you got wonderful moiré effects. Oh yeah… and there was the UFO fight, between a flying saucer and a rocket. They fired lasers at each other and moved randomly, always targetting the other ship. They looped around the screen edges, but only fired if they were near one another. I used to have a video of that one. Happy days…

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I NEED the lawnmower. Favorite of all time.

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I am thrust back to my youth by this post, very nice.

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Uh, I’m not hearing any music? That’s half the experience.

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Lunatic Fringe is a must-have.

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We Gnu/linux users get this build right in
https://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/screenshots/

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I was wondering how many years ago development stopped, until I saw this one:

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Development is ongoing. jwz has even done ports for Android and iOS.

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Me: nifty, I should go get it, I wonder if it is “xscreensaver” in the App Store?
My phone: you already downloaded it & forgot all about it. Do you want me to open it now?
The clock: 45 minutes have passed, do you want to stop looking at screensavers on the phone now?
Me: Yeah, I guess it is time to forget about it for a decade again.

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I always used can of worms.

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