Neat, interesting way to waste clock ticks. Some, after a nifty screenshot, make great wallpapers/backgrounds. The most famous line of Screensavers for Windoze machines is After Dark by Berkeley Systems. Linux includes enough nifty screensavers to keep anyone interested for a while. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.

“Screensaver” can also be used to describe the special effects sometimes experienced while one has the flu. I have the flu right now. Upon standing, everything spins. When I close my eyes, I see swirls of colour and mandala-like designs, forming and re-forming, that are at least as vivid and complex as the animated gems often found on wharfinger’s homenode. He’d probably like them a lot.

I'll be happy when everything stops moving.

Sadly, the necessity of the screen saver is a modern urban legend. Your computer's monitor is not going to etch the last thing you saw directly on the surface of your CRT unless you try beyond all reasonable measure. The appropriate statistics:

A monochrome (black-and-white) screen takes three to four months with the same image before ill effects are obvious. This is actually a little bit evident; on my old Macintosh SE, the menu bar is slightly visible, even when it's not on the screen. But that's after 16 years of constant use.

A color monitor will need over four years of nearly constant use before anything will happen; that's with constant screen imaging, twenty-four hours a day. Not too likely.

Note that I advocate the use of screen savers regardless; though they may be a myth, screen savers are still fun.


Information from Macworld Secrets, 1995 and the Macintosh Bible, 4th Ed.

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