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by fredley·5y ago·view on hn ↗
Beautiful. The nostalgia hit me very hard with this.

I remember in the original version you had all sorts of options, and could even combine screensavers.

For people who may not remember: screensavers used to be a neccessity as old CRT tubes would 'burn in' an image if they held it static for too long - leaving a shadow of the static image permanently. Screensavers kicked in after a few minutes and displayed something dynamic so as to save your screen from burn in.

In the 90's, having a cool custom screensaver was cool (around the same time that having a custom ringtone on your 3210 was cool), and you'd pay money for software like After Dark.

7 comments
Screensavers are a thing again on modern TV because OLEDs have a pretty serious burn-in problem apparently. Not much creativity there, probably because it should not be annoying, so it's stuff like art galleries or subtle fireworks effects that also 'train' the pixels.

Best screensaver I used to have was the BSOD one from xscreensaver, so many people fell for it.

Second best is the nyan cat screensaver.

Currently have an Apple image gallery of space themed pictures.

The Apple TV 4k screensavers (city flyovers filmed in slow motion with a drone) are beautiful and I always end up staring at the screen for a while.

https://youtu.be/lbj9kihTwcc

That's a horribly outdated version linked in that video sadly, and that one no longer runs on recent macOS (because it's not notarized).

Just in case anyone wants to try it, please grab latest build here instead : https://github.com/JohnCoates/Aerial/releases

Or if you want an installer with auto updates, get it here : https://aerialscreensaver.github.io

Latest betas include Apple Music/Spotify integration, Speed control, and brings back the ability to put your videos anywhere (including an external drive!) on Monterey.

I grabbed a screensaver app for my Sony TV that uses the AppleTV 4K HDR screensavers, and... yeah, it's really, really nice.

Not all of them are city flyovers; there are also long, slow pans of areas like the Great Wall. Generally, it's just gorgeous.

Part of the reason these are so captivating is that they are slowed down instead of real time. This gives them an other-worldly quality where you can see extreme detail but in a different motion than you would normally see it.
In high school in the very early 2000s my friends and I thought it was hilarious to add bluescreen slides to our PowerPoint presentations. Most of the computers ran Windows 98 and it was a common sight, we’d get gasps in class.

It was dumb harmless fun.

I knew someone that failed to prepare for their presentation, and did this as an excuse the presentation computer was not working and had to reschedule
My favorite trick was to take a screenshot of the desktop, hide all the icons and the task bar, then set the screenshot as the wallpaper. It gets even the most advanced users every time.
It's my last day at my current job. Thank you for inspiring me to set up a 1 minute BSOD screensaver for the next person who uses my current workstation.
I was always fond of this one.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/blue...

The electron guns in CRTs also take about 30 minutes to warm up. Before then the black level is pretty high and the image is washed out. So there is benefit to running a screensaver on a CRT but OLEDs do best when just put to sleep quickly.
Uhhh, no. I've never seen a CRT take more than 10-15 seconds to "warm up", and I've been looking at CRTs since the early 70's.
It takes about 5 second for my LCD monitor to wake-up after a sleep, which is a bit annoying. A screen saver disappears in a fraction of a second even on old hardware.
Working on a next-gen operating system for a large tech company in the Pacific NorthWest in the previous century, I was able to reliably bluescreen the OS when stressing the network using an internal network protocol driver.

Later that day, I read in one of the trade rags about a columnist talking about the efficacy of a bluescreen screensaver.

1+1 = 2

Less than an hour later, most of it spent transcribing the bluescreen text output, I had a BSOD screensaver. Released it to the company intranet and waited for the ensuing hilarity.

Wasn't long before the guys in the build lab took advantage of the screensaver.

They installed the BSOD screensaver and disconnected the mouse and keyboard.

The main dev on the project comes in, sees the bluescreen and proceeds to restart the computer! Oops.

A few years later, on another multi-year large software project at this PNW tech company, the morning that the software was supposed to be signed off and released to manufacturing, the build lab, different group of people, installed the BSOD screensaver and disconnected the mouse and keyboard on the dogfood server for the project.

When the project manager arrived, he went to check on the status of the server, only to find the BSOD. This time a server restart was averted.

So, it's all fun and games until a server is hard rebooted.

> Best screensaver I used to have was the BSOD one from xscreensaver, so many people fell for it.

Same here - including myself, when I came back from a bathroom break to find it had landed on the MacOS error screen.

I used to change my screensaver every week or so. These days, I’m really happy with a slightly customised Flurry on macOS, or an clone on Linux.
The new nintendo switch has an oled screen. Is that likely to be vulnerable to burn in due to game ui staying constant?
https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/worried-about-nintendo-s...

> We've designed the OLED screen to aim for longevity as much as possible, but OLED displays can experience image retention if subjected to static visuals over a long period of time. However, users can take preventative measures to preserve the screen [by] utilizing features included in the Nintendo Switch systems by default, such as auto-brightness function to prevent the screen from getting too bright, and the auto-sleep function to go into 'auto sleep' mode after short periods of time.

Oooh now let's talk about PointCast. Who remembers when the future of the Internet was push?

https://www.wired.com/1997/03/ff-push/

Man I miss the enthusiasm and optimism of the 90's
I keep trying to figure out if the internet really was more fun back then, or if I was just younger and less jaded. Maybe both?
No, I knew that "push" was BS. The concept and the promise of the Internet as a whole was exciting but most of the startup scene (especially in the frothy late 90s) was pure land-grab easy-money types.
> This new medium doesn't wait for clicks. It doesn't need computers. It means personalized experiences not bound by a page - think of a how-to origami video channel or a 3-D furry-muckers VR space. It means information that cascades, not just through a PC, but across all forms of communication devices - headlines sent to a pager, or a traffic map popping up on a cellular phone. And it means content that will not hesitate to find you - whether you've clicked on something recently or not.

Sounds pretty much completely accurate.

I think writers for Wired in the 90s were paid by the buzzword.
I ran software for Dell's portables during the height of PointCast craziness - they eventually banned it because aboutq 2/3 (IIRC) of the company's bandwidth for the Product Group offices was being consumed by PointCast news updates and animations!
Haha, PointCast was one of the earliest "next big thing" apps I installed on my Mac in the Dot-com era. I never really found it useful apart from the always available implementation of SameGame.
Man, but didn't it feel like the future? All this information in real time being shown on-screen! What's the weather? What is Ciena's stock price right now?

Never mind those ads that keep showing up, that's just a minor inconvenience, right?

And yeah, I need to keep my modem on all the time and tie up my voice line but maybe someday we'll get that T1 installed in the office.

PointCast was what I what load up with new content for long flights. Catch up my news.
Windows users might remember Active Desktop in the context of "push". Oh, those were the days.
Oh, so that's why! Until now, I believed they were used to reduce energy consumption when the screen wasn't used. That's why I believed they were just some gimmicky, useless piece of software.

A bit off topic, but I also miss the screen obliterating hammer we used to play with as kids. Any modern, web rendition of that piece of stress-reliever?

You mean this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLYatZdABrs
Yes, that's the one. I totally forgot that there were other options too.

It's sad that such cultural artifacts are more ephemeral than a mesopotamian clay tablet. Humans four thousand years from now may wonder what happened that made us culturally unproductive, unaware that almost everything we made didn't even exist.

It looks like the program you are talking about, "Desktop Games," is still hosted on: http://www.gemtree.com/program.htm. No idea if it works on modern Windows or not.
Not just CRTs - I had an LCD around 2006 that I left on a browser window for hours and I had the browser's window & menu bar slightly burned in for a good few months after that.
I had this happen a couple times to my iMac. The worst time I went on a week long vacation and my screen never went to sleep.

I used to use this program that flashed the screen white and black rapidly and it would clear it up in about an hour.

Haven’t seen any trouble in a few years, is this a solved problem now?

I have a 2017 5K iMac and don't use screensaver. Just a few weeks ago I noticed that the Dock and menu bar is very slightly burned in.
Can’t recall any burn-in with recent LED displays. AFAIK it is an issue with OLED ones still.
On the subject of options, I seem to remember being able to alter how toasted the toast was!
You're totally right! I think you could have flying fish too!
> screensavers used to be a neccessity as old CRT tubes would 'burn in' an image if they held it static for too long

Why didn't we just show a black image?

You could, but it was (and is?) cooler to have flying toasters.
That's not the whole reason, though (at least for the original intent). Turning off CRT monitors means both a cycle added (which is not good for the electromagnets and capacitors) and diminished brightness due to cycling (this is due to the "warming up" needed to ensure that the screen is as bright as it can be, which takes up to around 30 minutes).
Could be a UI thing. When the screen is black you expect the monitor to be off and press the on-off switch.

Same thing with switching monitors off after work.

Though same screensavers would run for a while and then switch the monitor to power saving mode, effectively turning it off.

CRTs were in use for decades.

In the early 1990s, there was no power saving. You could turn off the monitor with the front power switch, or use the screensaver.

A few years later, power saving options began to be introduced. The computer could signal to the monitor that it should go into a low(er) power state. Turning on again took at least 5 seconds for a visible picture, sometimes 15-20. That might not be appropriate if the computer had to be used in response to something like a phone call, or visitor at reception.

CRTS couldn't really show "black". It was more of a dull gray. That's what made the plasma display so amazing with it's true black. LEDs and now OLED are the same except they do not ahve the mass of a dying star.
That's not how CRT physics works.

The screen is charged. That charge causes burn in. The best way to not burn in, short of turning the screen off, is to charge the screen as little as possible. The least charge you can give it is a black signal, which means least burn in.

I can hear the 8-bit flapping sounds in my head, even though I haven't heard them in at least 2 decades.