Today is IT Professionals Day, so we’re looking at an invention that has helped a lot of IT pros keep our monitors in proper working order: the screen saver.
And the screen saver’s history starts before there were computer screens in need of saving.
Wear and tear is real, so often when you have a machine or a device that’s on for most or all of the time, there’s a system that idles that device or machine when it’s not in use.
Tedium found auto-dimming switches for car headlights as early as the 1930s, and home dimmers in the late 1950s.
The same issue came up when arcade games started getting popular.
Their screens would start to develop a ghost image of the game if they sat unplayed for too long, so programmers created what’s known today as “attract mode”: it’s a demo of the game to both attract players and prevent that burn-in on the screen.
Burn-in protection came to the PC in the 1980s, thanks in large part to a magazine article from programmer John Socha.
He wrote up a program that ran a three-minute countdown timer in the background of the machine.
Press any key and the countdown would restart, but if it got to zero it would dim the screen.
In the 90s, Microsoft turned the screen saver into a branding exercise: to show off how Windows could handle 3D graphics, they had programmers create eye-catching and whimsical animations or algorithms, from pipes to flying text to that brick wall maze thing and of course the flying toasters.
And that set the tone for the next decade or so.
Eventually screen savers stopped being the default; the risk of burn-in is lower with modern monitors, and it’s less energy intensive to just have the computer screen go to sleep instead of starting up a screen saver.
But while screen savers are less common on our laptops and desktop machines, they’re now showing up on our TVs.
Raise your hand if you’ve ever zoned out for a few minutes watching the skyline of Roku City scroll by?
A lot of us who commute via public transportation are pretty glued to our phones on those trips.
Warsaw, Poland is encouraging people to try something different: the city has put a branch of its public library system in a metro station, so commuters can check out books.
Plus there’s an event space and a hydroponic garden down there!
Saving One Screen At A Time (Tedium)
Warsaw opens metro station ‘express’ library to get commuters off their phones (The Guardian)