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                          The History of Screen Savers

   Adam Engst

   At Tedium, [1]Ernie Smith writes:

     Having seen a lot of pipes, wavy lines, and flying toasters in my
     day, there was a real novelty to the art of screen savers, which
     became another way to put your visual mark on the devices you own.
     The animated screen saver is still out there, of course, but its
     cultural relevance has faded considerably. In fact, GNOME, one of
     the two dominant window managers in the FOSS world (particularly on
     Linux), straight-up doesn't support graphical screen savers in
     modern versions, unless you're willing to get hacky. And it's not
     like people kick up colorful screen savers on their smartphones or
     tablets. But maybe we're thinking about screen savers all wrong in
     terms of their cultural role. When it comes to screen savers, what
     if GNOME has it right?

   Smith traces the desire to prevent burn-in on a CRT display back to the
   mid-1970s when automatic dimming was used in dumb terminals. The first
   animated screen savers probably appeared with the video game 'attract
   mode' that played while an arcade or home video game was sitting idle.
   It's a fascinating look at where screen savers came from, and the
   dedicated screen saver historian could unearth numerous articles about
   [2]screen savers in the TidBITS archives. While I'm trying Apple's
   Aerials screen saver (shuffling the underwater videos) right now, I
   always end up returning to [3]Electric Sheep. If you still use a Mac
   screen saver rather than just letting your display go dark, what's your
   current choice?

   [4]Read original article

References

   1. https://tedium.co/2025/01/12/screen-saver-history/
   2. https://tidbits.com/?s=screen%20saver&sort=newest
   3. https://electricsheep.org/
   4. https://tedium.co/2025/01/12/screen-saver-history/

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