Screensavers and Computer Dreams
From Maze
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(New page: Although 10 PRINT ... was not designed as a screensaver. No one seems to have made a claim that this program will be useful for preventing phosphor burn-in and that it is worth typing in a...) | |||
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| − | Although 10 PRINT ... was not designed as a screensaver. No one seems to have made a claim that this program will be useful for preventing phosphor burn-in and that it is worth typing in and running before leaving one's computer for a cup of coffee. Still, it is a non-interactive, endlessly looping program that produces a changing and not entirely regular image. If one had to put this program into some familiar pigeonhole, "screensaver," although it might be a somewhat degrading one, would not be too poor of a choice. So, why not consider the program alongside screensavers and their antecedents? | + | There is no evidence that 10 PRINT ... was designed as a screensaver. No one seems to have made a claim that this program will be useful for preventing phosphor burn-in and that it is worth typing in and running before leaving one's computer for a cup of coffee. Still, it is a non-interactive, endlessly looping program that produces a changing and not entirely regular image. If one had to put this program into some familiar pigeonhole, "screensaver," although it might be a somewhat degrading one, would not be too poor of a choice. So, why not consider the program alongside screensavers and their antecedents? |
Several sources attribute the first screensaver, at least for personal computers, to John Socha, who also developed the file manager Norton Commander. The December 1983 issue of _Softalk for the IBM Personal Computer_ presented Socha's program scrnsave, which simply blanked the screen of a PC after three minutes of idleness. The history of the modern screensaver begins with this degenerate case, this simplest possible image. Many waves of looping motion pictures, often generated from code rather than relying on the simple display of images, would follow that blank, through to contemporary computing in our age of phosphor-free flat panel displays. | Several sources attribute the first screensaver, at least for personal computers, to John Socha, who also developed the file manager Norton Commander. The December 1983 issue of _Softalk for the IBM Personal Computer_ presented Socha's program scrnsave, which simply blanked the screen of a PC after three minutes of idleness. The history of the modern screensaver begins with this degenerate case, this simplest possible image. Many waves of looping motion pictures, often generated from code rather than relying on the simple display of images, would follow that blank, through to contemporary computing in our age of phosphor-free flat panel displays. | ||
