Berkeley Systems “After Dark” screensavers recreated in CSS(bryanbraun.com) |
Berkeley Systems “After Dark” screensavers recreated in CSS(bryanbraun.com) |
There was also a Windows (3.x) version.
Obviously, warp.
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.
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.
It was dumb harmless fun.
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.
Same here - including myself, when I came back from a bathroom break to find it had landed on the MacOS error screen.
Sounds pretty much completely accurate.
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?
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?
Why didn't we just show a black image?
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.
I know one of the authors of Flying Toasters and sent him the link. Here's what he had to say:
"It's a rough approximation, which is super cool, but misses all of the nuance.
"You see, back in the day, there were very strong competitors to After Dark that had as much or more animations. The thing that set After Dark was a "je ne sais quoi" that felt like an elevated experience. Both the customers & the competitors thought this was some sort of accident, or that the animations were important, but neither of these things was true.
"The secret was that people loved the nuance of interacting with the product (& subtlety in the animations) and it was very carefully designed with cognitive science. I pushed the team very hard before I would let anything be released because I insisted on the nuance."
There was also an amazing set of screensavers which I don't remember the name of, but one of the set was called 'kaos', and a lot of them were based on fractals. If anyone recalls the name of that software...
[edit] I found it! DarkSide of the Mac by Tom Dowdy. Brilliant. http://poubelle.com/DarkSideDocs.html
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Castaway
[1] https://uxdesign.cc/the-tale-of-johnny-castaway-the-legendar...
[2] http://nivs.dk/jc/ (open source recreation project)
[3] https://genesistemple.com/johnny-castaway-no-johnny-is-an-is...
Just wild to think of having to go through all of that for something you can download in less than a few milliseconds today.
I need this on a shirt. And in a plaque on my desk at the office. And framed at home.
https://www.bryanbraun.com/after-dark-css/all/rainstorm.html
takes <40% of idle low range gaming GPU = nothing, but 30% of one gaming 4GHz CPU thread, what is going on there? Chrome GPU process jumps between 20 an 40% while sliding 6 bitmaps around, something you could even do on a Virge in 1996.
Some time ago I noticed an older 3GHz i5 laptop, otherwise perfectly usable, would start to struggle decoding h264 webcam stream because webmaster decided to use CSS animation for a scrolling title bar superimposed over video feed.
(Flying toaster images came apparently from there.)
EDIT: or even better
document.getAnimations().forEach(animation => animation.playbackRate = 0.1)
A link to the original guide and the modified steps I used: https://gist.github.com/atommclain/863e5cd47ab714c1e4e966606...
Perhaps you need to adapt your work to actually render on an NSView first ...
I seem to remember there being a city skyline screensaver as well, was there an After Dark 2?
Paint, PowerPoint, even screensavers. Counting elements, making bets with my brother which will appear more often. Pointing fingers at the screen in the hopes nothing will touch it.
Good times.
Sure, it was in B&W instead of color, but when a bigger fish collided with a smaller fish, he'd eat it!
Edit: here's a video where someone (who was probably -20 years old when it came out) demos it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyLtenNh7Sc
What's funny is that these screensavers were _expensive_, and thus people pirated them. I remember the most active warez BBS in area had a whole file section dedicated to screensavers.
Many of your customers won't have top-notch systems.
I wonder if there's some unnecessary reflow going on here? (reflow forces animations to happen on the CPU instead of the GPU)
You can edit
.rain {top: -4800px;
Hmm, maybe its reading buffer back from GPU and compositing in software? I did an experiment and deleted 5 of the 6 DIVs reducing load to 100MB/s fillrate and CPU utilization didnt even budge .... so Chrome is doing something stupid like reading GPU buffer back to main memory and pushing it to GPU again. This explains why my older i5 laptop was so loaded by stupid tiny text scroll.
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.
> 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.
Though too be fair, I think the low power mode wasn't signaled by a black image but instead turning off the sync signals or something like that. (I hope you get the idea that I don't know how it worked here)
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.
Every article needs to be about something that's world changing (positive or negative) and they need enough articles to put in between all the ads they sold. If there isn't enough world changing stuff in a given month, or the writers got started on the wrong things, they've got to hype up what they've got.
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.
The point is that you could not give it no signal without it being off. LEDs can do this. The closest to black from a CRT I saw was from Sony's Professional Studio reference monitors that were $32K for a 32" screen. When Sony brought out their OLED reference monitors, they did a side-by-side comparisson of their best CRT, an LCD and the new OLED. All 3 were receiving the same signal, and when the demo started black, the CRT was clearly "on" but the OLED looked "off" with the LCD in between. Just about the time I'm thinking to myself that the CRT brightness was turned up, they switched to reference bars and all were calibrated correctly.
Arguing that CRTs could display true black is arguing against history.
If you can't or don't want to turn you CRT off... then what's the next best thing for avoiding burn-in?
Send it a black signal, or send it a bright signal?
It's the black signal, because it charges the screen less. Charging the screen is what causes burn in. If you charge it less you get less burn in.
> Arguing that CRTs could display true black
Nobody argued this. Where did you think you read this? I said 'show a black image'. Send it a black signal. It's the minimum signal you can send it without turning it off.
Every article I read back then was written by a real person about something they cared about. Now it feels like every search result is just 100 pages of AI generated, generic content used to drive clicks to the site. And what content is actually written by a real person, it's in service to their brand and it's tuned for engagement and sharing on social media.
A lot of software back then was open and didn't hide too many of the details. Today, all the technical bits are hidden away and user experiences are carefully controlled and tuned for engagement. Think IRC vs Slack or FB messenger. On irc, you can whois, dcc, technical bits everywhere in the UI.
In the 90s, there was a question whether or not you should include ads and banners on your site. Later, it seemed like the ads went away but actually they took over. So much of the internet experience now is about monetization. Even malware is about making money. You gotta jump into the new tech to get that feeling of wonder and possibly.
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.
Most people lived in 3 or 4 IIRC story rowhouses. The richest were at the bottom nearest the latrine, and had their own kitchen and servants to work the kitchen. The middle class were in the middle, with some kitchen facilities they operated themselves. The poorest were at the top with no way to cook and relied on street carts.
I was kinda shocked to read this description and how similar it was to a modern city. But since all that is wood, it's all gone. We only know even this because Rome was such a powerful and rich culture that there was a lot of writing, and a comparatively lot got saved for centuries. (Although the vast majority has still been lost, just from estimating based on works cited by ancient works that we don't have copies of)
Writing wasn't cheap, and preserving and transmitting writing isn't cheap. Writing about obvious everyday stuff everyone knows in such an environment has a much smaller chance of making it through the many historical hoops it needed to make its way to us.
Many other more prehistorical places could well have had significant buildup that we would recognize as modern in all but industrialization, but except when someone went to the trouble to build with stone instead of the more common random natural materials like wood.... all gone.
Who knows what went on that we just will never know about because it didn't get written down enough or the culture that wrote it wasn't powerful enough or long lived enough to preserve enough of those writings?
(IANA historian and might be a bit or a lot off. Biggest sources are "Rome: A history in seven sackings" and "Against the grain" Not trying to make strong claims here, just a general sense of wonder at how big the gap between what we assume about the past and what actually was could be. As a layman just dipping my toe into learning more about early history / prehistory, it's shocking and fascinating)
It was the prank that kept on giving.
What company won't wipe and reimage it before redeployment?
Hell, I usually wipe my own work PCs before surrendering them after an upgrade, to make sure it's done properly.
I could wipe, but I want to make as little work for my replacement as possible. Well, maybe a few minutes of extra work to get rid of a screensaver.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/blue...
It's not "true" burn-in (like CRTs or OLED) as it goes away after a bit but it's fairly easy to trigger with the current trend of very white/light grey designs in macOS, the easiest way to notice it is move from a whitish area to a mid grey one (Daring Fireball is a great example of that problematic grey).
I also have been unlucky on that draw on my 2015 iMac. I barely noticed it at first but newer macOS versions have made it very noticeable sadly. One more reason to run Aerial ;)
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.
No guarantees from me that it's any good : https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.codingbuff...
It's open source too, according to the description, it streams and doesn't cache videos and apparently it handles 4K HDR. If data usage is a concern to you, be aware that some videos are close to 1 GB.
Not all of them are city flyovers; there are also long, slow pans of areas like the Great Wall. Generally, it's just gorgeous.
The otherworldliness of the video seems to come more from the smoothness of the motion and the uncommon perspective. Because many of the scenes are captured with drones instead of helicopters or airplanes they have a literal bird's perspective in terms of velocity and altitude.
They definitely are massively stabilised though and Apple used to update videos from time to time, tweaking stabilization, colors or sometimes length and pushing new versions. They haven't done that in a long while though.
Some seem shot from fairly high altitude and may use planes instead, and at least for some videos, I've heard they used 3rd parties to shoot them.
Such a subtle huge flex.
I'm sure for the right opportunity they'd work with anybody. I suspect it's not a matter of connections, but rather, "We'll put a gorgeous shot of your facility on millions of TVs worldwide" is a slam-dunk pitch.
Indeed they are, I was confirming your recollection that the issue affects OLED screens.
If bandwidth is a concern, you can also point it towards a local JSON file with whatever URLs you want, so you can mirror the screensavers locally and then stream them from there.