The world’s first screen saver was not like a dream at all. It was a blank screen. It was called SCRNSAVE, and when it was released in 1983 it was very exciting to a niche audience. It was like John Cage’s 4’33″ but for computers—a score for meted-out doses of silence.
Instructions for using the screen saver were first published in the tech magazine Softalk. The headline read: SAVE YOUR MONITOR SCREEN! Across from the article was a full-page photo of firefighters rescuing a computer monitor from a burning building.
The article explained that there was a new danger facing computers: “burn-in.” Basically, if a screen showed the same thing for too long, the shadow of its image would be tattooed to the pixels. A screen saver stirs the soup of the image to keep it from sticking to the screen.
The science behind burn-in is grotesque: picture swarms of electrons like locusts flinging themselves at the thin phosphor coating of a screen, chewing holes. A screen saver periodically smokes the locusts out, thereby saving the screen from the disfigurement of monotony.
SCRNSAVE was a big deal engineering-wise, but it never caught on with most computer users, who, reasonably, did not see the value in making their screens shut off every few minutes. Before long, software developers figured out how to convince people to adopt screen savers: aesthetics. The screen savers had to make people want to look back at the screens they had just looked away from.
In 1989, a software company called Berkeley Systems launched a program called After Dark. Instead of just going blank, After Dark screen savers showed animations: flying toasters, or falling rain, or overlapping curved lines in neon gradients. The new screen savers took the world by storm. But in terms of preventing burn-in, flying toasters were no better than a blank screen. Their purpose was pleasure.
