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Berkeley Systems “After Dark” screensavers recreated in CSS
- cmiller1 5y agoI was just playing around with an old version of After Dark yesterday and the "Warp" one is the only one out of these that was on it. These mostly seem to be from After Dark 2.0 and later.
- fredley 5y agoBeautiful. The nostalgia hit me very hard with this. I remember in the original version you had all sorts of options, and could even combine screensavers. For people who may not remember: screensavers used to be a neccessity as old CRT tubes would 'burn in' an image if they held it static for too long - leaving a shadow of the static image permanently. Screensavers kicked in after a few minutes and displayed something dynamic so as to save your screen from burn in. In the 90's, having a cool custom screensaver was cool (around the same time that having a custom ringtone on your 3210 was cool), and you'd pay money for software like After Dark.
- cesaref 5y agoOn the subject of options, I seem to remember being able to alter how toasted the toast was!
- fredley 5y agoYou're totally right! I think you could have flying fish too!
- Cthulhu_ 5y agoScreensavers are a thing again on modern TV because OLEDs have a pretty serious burn-in problem apparently. Not much creativity there, probably because it should not be annoying, so it's stuff like art galleries or subtle fireworks effects that also 'train' the pixels. Best screensaver I used to have was the BSOD one from xscreensaver, so many people fell for it. Second best is the nyan cat screensaver. Currently have an Apple image gallery of space themed pictures.
- willis936 5y agoThe electron guns in CRTs also take about 30 minutes to warm up. Before then the black level is pretty high and the image is washed out. So there is benefit to running a screensaver on a CRT but OLEDs do best when just put to sleep quickly.
- vidanay 5y agoUhhh, no. I've never seen a CRT take more than 10-15 seconds to "warm up", and I've been looking at CRTs since the early 70's.
- willis936 5y agoWhen was the last time you looked at one? Was it todsy? I own half a dozen PVMs and two PC monitors and have been looking at CRTs consistently since the 90s.
- citrin_ru 5y agoIt takes about 5 second for my LCD monitor to wake-up after a sleep, which is a bit annoying. A screen saver disappears in a fraction of a second even on old hardware.
- donatj 5y agoIn high school in the very early 2000s my friends and I thought it was hilarious to add bluescreen slides to our PowerPoint presentations. Most of the computers ran Windows 98 and it was a common sight, we’d get gasps in class. It was dumb harmless fun.
- sumtechguy 5y agoI was always fond of this one. https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/bluescreen https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/downloads/blue...
- dylan604 5y agoI knew someone that failed to prepare for their presentation, and did this as an excuse the presentation computer was not working and had to reschedule
- Nextgrid 5y agoNot just CRTs - I had an LCD around 2006 that I left on a browser window for hours and I had the browser's window & menu bar slightly burned in for a good few months after that.
- donatj 5y agoI had this happen a couple times to my iMac. The worst time I went on a week long vacation and my screen never went to sleep. I used to use this program that flashed the screen white and black rapidly and it would clear it up in about an hour. Haven’t seen any trouble in a few years, is this a solved problem now?
- kergonath 5y agoCan’t recall any burn-in with recent LED displays. AFAIK it is an issue with OLED ones still.
- Arrath 5y agoSure is. My Galaxy S7 has the keyboard and some of the WhatsApp top bar interface (from texting my wife so much) burned in.
- yreg 5y agoI have a 2017 5K iMac and don't use screensaver. Just a few weeks ago I noticed that the Dock and menu bar is very slightly burned in.
- ahmedfromtunis 5y agoOh, so that's why! Until now, I believed they were used to reduce energy consumption when the screen wasn't used. That's why I believed they were just some gimmicky, useless piece of software. A bit off topic, but I also miss the screen obliterating hammer we used to play with as kids. Any modern, web rendition of that piece of stress-reliever?
- fredley 5y agoYou mean this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLYatZdABrs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLYatZdABrs
- ahmedfromtunis 5y agoYes, that's the one. I totally forgot that there were other options too. It's sad that such cultural artifacts are more ephemeral than a mesopotamian clay tablet. Humans four thousand years from now may wonder what happened that made us culturally unproductive, unaware that almost everything we made didn't even exist.
- fredley 5y agoThe same goes for mesopotamia. We know a bit from the clay tablets, but we don't know anything about the ephemoral memes of the time.
- moftz 5y agoOccasionally we find clay tablets like the one where the guy is bitching about quality of copper ingots he was supposed to buy for his boss. It's kind of a fun look into normal, everyday life that almost never made it past the recycle bin of history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nasir https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nasir
- galdosdi 5y agoThis reminds me of recently learning more about ancient Rome. Since most stuff except for some monuments was built with wood, it's all gone now. Most people lived in 3 or 4 IIRC story rowhouses. The richest were at the bottom nearest the latrine, and had their own kitchen and servants to work the kitchen. The middle class were in the middle, with some kitchen facilities they operated themselves. The poorest were at the top with no way to cook and relied on street carts. I was kinda shocked to read this description and how similar it was to a modern city. But since all that is wood, it's all gone. We only know even this because Rome was such a powerful and rich culture that there was a lot of writing, and a comparatively lot got saved for centuries. (Although the vast majority has still been lost, just from estimating based on works cited by ancient works that we don't have copies of) Writing wasn't cheap, and preserving and transmitting writing isn't cheap. Writing about obvious everyday stuff everyone knows in such an environment has a much smaller chance of making it through the many historical hoops it needed to make its way to us. Many other more prehistorical places could well have had significant buildup that we would recognize as modern in all but industrialization, but except when someone went to the trouble to build with stone instead of the more common random natural materials like wood.... all gone. Who knows what went on that we just will never know about because it didn't get written down enough or the culture that wrote it wasn't powerful enough or long lived enough to preserve enough of those writings? (IANA historian and might be a bit or a lot off. Biggest sources are "Rome: A history in seven sackings" and "Against the grain" Not trying to make strong claims here, just a general sense of wonder at how big the gap between what we assume about the past and what actually was could be. As a layman just dipping my toe into learning more about early history / prehistory, it's shocking and fascinating)
- chrisseaton 5y ago> screensavers used to be a neccessity as old CRT tubes would 'burn in' an image if they held it static for too long Why didn't we just show a black image?
- fredley 5y agoYou could, but it was (and is?) cooler to have flying toasters.
- zinekeller 5y agoThat's not the whole reason, though (at least for the original intent). Turning off CRT monitors means both a cycle added (which is not good for the electromagnets and capacitors) and diminished brightness due to cycling (this is due to the "warming up" needed to ensure that the screen is as bright as it can be, which takes up to around 30 minutes).
- bluGill 5y agoTurning off and showing a black image are not the same thing. Some old CRTs had a low power most where the power was on - thus the parts stayed warm - but no image was displayed. Though too be fair, I think the low power mode wasn't signaled by a black image but instead turning off the sync signals or something like that. (I hope you get the idea that I don't know how it worked here)
- chrisseaton 5y agoShow a black image, not turn off.
- phicoh 5y agoCould be a UI thing. When the screen is black you expect the monitor to be off and press the on-off switch. Same thing with switching monitors off after work. Though same screensavers would run for a while and then switch the monitor to power saving mode, effectively turning it off.
- joezydeco 5y agoOooh now let's talk about PointCast. Who remembers when the future of the Internet was push? https://www.wired.com/1997/03/ff-push/ https://www.wired.com/1997/03/ff-push/
- fredley 5y agoMan I miss the enthusiasm and optimism of the 90's
- zippergz 5y agoI keep trying to figure out if the internet really was more fun back then, or if I was just younger and less jaded. Maybe both?
- tekproxy 5y agoBoth. The internet was full of early adopter, tech enthusiast types. You'd certainly pickup on this. Maybe a bit of the magic was your youth, but the tech was new and magical to everyone. Every article I read back then was written by a real person about something they cared about. Now it feels like every search result is just 100 pages of AI generated, generic content used to drive clicks to the site. And what content is actually written by a real person, it's in service to their brand and it's tuned for engagement and sharing on social media. A lot of software back then was open and didn't hide too many of the details. Today, all the technical bits are hidden away and user experiences are carefully controlled and tuned for engagement. Think IRC vs Slack or FB messenger. On irc, you can whois, dcc, technical bits everywhere in the UI. In the 90s, there was a question whether or not you should include ads and banners on your site. Later, it seemed like the ads went away but actually they took over. So much of the internet experience now is about monetization. Even malware is about making money. You gotta jump into the new tech to get that feeling of wonder and possibly.
- queuebert 5y agoExactly. When it was young, the internet was about communication. Now it is about money and all the tackiness that comes with it.
- basseq 5y agoI can hear the 8-bit flapping sounds in my head, even though I haven't heard them in at least 2 decades.
- _notathrowaway 5y agoLovely work!
- user3939382 5y agoThese guys also make a version of flying toasters for macOS (it’s what I use as my screen saver): https://en.infinisys.co.jp/product/afterdarkclassicset/upgrade.shtml https://en.infinisys.co.jp/product/afterdarkclassicset/upgra...
- jleyank 5y agoI miss the worms which ate the screen. Very Pink Floyd.
- plantain 5y agoIt's missing the music! I still remember the Flying Toasters music 20 years later...
- anotherhue 5y agoAnd the toast popping :) https://youtu.be/3j-SODCxknc https://youtu.be/3j-SODCxknc
- Udo_Schmitz 5y agoAnd it's flap! Flap! Flap! Now help is on the way.
- k__ 5y agoWhen I "played" with the PC of my step dad, I somehow made everything a game. Paint, PowerPoint, even screensavers. Counting elements, making bets with my brother which will appear more often. Pointing fingers at the screen in the hopes nothing will touch it. Good times.
- commandlinefan 5y agoMy uncle had a PC with the "warp" screensaver on it. My brother and I would sit in front of it and pretend to be Han Solo and Luke Skywalker.
- moftz 5y agoI used to make little movies on our Gateway 2000 with PowerPoint 97 using clipart and slide animations.
- k__ 5y agoYes, me too!
- chrisco255 5y agoSomeone reminded me of the iconic toaster screensaver the other day. And I totally forgot that people used to go to a physical store, purchase a diskette or disc with screensavers on it and then install it on their computer for cool points. Just wild to think of having to go through all of that for something you can download in less than a few milliseconds today.
- mentos 5y agoReminds me of a Kurt Vonnegut story about going to the post office to mail a letter https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9299135 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9299135
- jagged-chisel 5y ago> We are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you any different. I need this on a shirt. And in a plaque on my desk at the office. And framed at home.
- tonyedgecombe 5y agoOr copy a friend’s disk, piracy was rife then.
- voidfunc 5y agoAlways loved the Flying Toasters... the XScreensaver version of it stinks in comparison. I seem to remember there being a city skyline screensaver as well, was there an After Dark 2?
- Solstinox 5y agoThe Star Trek TOS and TNG After Dark Screensavers took things to another level. Tribbles filling your screen. Worf phasering away your desktop.
- rainbowzootsuit 5y agoI had this as well. It also included sound effects so you stumble to bed late late at night after a long session of _Pathways into Darkness_, or maybe after meeting Achanar for the first time in _Myst_ and just as you're drifting into sleep you're jolted awake by the sound of a communicator establishing a connection, a red alert claxon, or more gently roused by tribbles cooing. You have to stumble back to the computer to turn off the power to your beige Yamaha powered computer speakers.
- noduerme 5y agoWhen I was a kid in the 90s learning to program, writing screen savers was one of the best ways to demo your "skills". Also just something creative to do when you didn't really have a project in mind. I still think they're an underappreciated art form, and it's kind of disappointing that OSX only ships with a couple really basic ones. Apple should bundle in all the AfterDark modules (there were several releases). There was also an amazing set of screensavers which I don't remember the name of, but one of the set was called 'kaos', and a lot of them were based on fractals. If anyone recalls the name of that software... [edit] I found it! DarkSide of the Mac by Tom Dowdy. Brilliant. http://poubelle.com/DarkSideDocs.html http://poubelle.com/DarkSideDocs.html
- mistrial9 5y agoRIP Tom Dowdy
- JKCalhoun 5y agoTom was a good guy.
- noduerme 5y agoI knew Tom Dowdy's name as a 14 year old kid in the early 90s; from DarkSide, which was an important inspiration to me trying to write graphics demos at the time, and I knew I'd seen his name in Apple credits. I've just been reading today how admired and loved he was, and I fell deep into his journals from the culinary academy, and his over-the-top method of making cassoulet, which is my favorite dish on the planet and seems like it was one of his. Many years later, my ex and I also talked about quitting the racket and going to culinary school, but I didn't have the guts. He sounds like an extraordinary fellow, and his work left an impression in my brain. I got DarkSide running on macintosh.js today and took a screenshot of his lovely "Kaos" algorithm, which builds these abstract works over time; I remember watching it for hours on a Mac II. https://ibb.co/ZTntfD5 https://ibb.co/ZTntfD5
- whalesalad 5y agoMy dad ran a flying toaster screensaver on our first home computer, a Macintosh Quadra 610. I used to love it as a kid!
- boilerupnc 5y agoJohnny Castaway [0] was my all-time favorite. Loved the Easter Eggs on certain days, loved that it adapted to the system clock to match day and night themes with real life and found the story entertaining (almost binge-worthy I might dare to say). [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Castaway https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johnny_Castaway [1] https://uxdesign.cc/the-tale-of-johnny-castaway-the-legendary-screensaver-from-the-90s-a75f6081f990 https://uxdesign.cc/the-tale-of-johnny-castaway-the-legendar... [2] http://nivs.dk/jc/ http://nivs.dk/jc/ (open source recreation project) [3] https://genesistemple.com/johnny-castaway-no-johnny-is-an-island https://genesistemple.com/johnny-castaway-no-johnny-is-an-is...
- jcpham2 5y agoI just want to add that my first introduction to PC's was a 286 or 386 at my friend's house in elementary school. His dad had this screensaver and I remember watching the guy on the island.
- KMnO4 5y agoSomewhat related, I would love a recreation of the W95 3D maze screensaver.
- JeanMarcS 5y agoWarp. Obviously, warp.
- throwaway17_17 5y agoIt is rare that something I read getting ready for work actually brightens my day, but this made me actually smile. Thanks for this and thank HN for being the kind of place that a post like this can hit the top of the page.
- zandorg 5y agoDon't forget JWZ of Netscape fame. https://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/ https://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/
- globular-toast 5y agoNSFW.
- marcodiego 5y agoWill it be ported to wayland?
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- kergonath 5y agoFlying toasters FTW!
- zxcvbn4038 5y agoMy favorites were the "Totally Twisted" screen savers from Berkeley Systems - particularly the "Voyer" screen saver where you saw the silhouettes of all the people in their apartments doing crazy things at night. https://shorturl.at/fDGTW https://shorturl.at/fDGTW
- teddyh 5y agoThe link does not work.
- myself248 5y agoI liked the daredevil, trying to jump schoolbuses and stuff with his motorbike. Once in a blue moon, he'd be driving a schoolbus trying to jump other stuff. What's funny is that these screensavers were _expensive_, and thus people pirated them. I remember the most active warez BBS in area had a whole file section dedicated to screensavers.
- zxcvbn4038 5y agoOne of the reasons I turned to open source is that I did pay for most the After Dark series and they all disappeared when Seirra? bought them out and shelved the company. That really killed any interest in commercial software for me.
- atommclain 5y agoLast year I went down a long rabbit hole of trying to get the original After Dark screen saver to run on macOS. I got pretty close; following a guide and using a Wine wrapper I was able to create a stand alone application that when launched runs After Dark full screen. Wiggling the mouse would exit full screen and close the app. The only part I am missing is getting macOS to launch an app instead of a traditional screen saver. A link to the original guide and the modified steps I used: https://gist.github.com/atommclain/863e5cd47ab714c1e4e966606b42e48d https://gist.github.com/atommclain/863e5cd47ab714c1e4e966606...
- jagged-chisel 5y agoGiven a standalone application, you might just be able to stick the executable in a .saver in the right place with the right Info.plist entries. Perhaps you need to adapt your work to actually render on an NSView first ...
- svnpenn 5y agoHere is Starry Night https://github.com/ldtcooper/starry-night https://github.com/ldtcooper/starry-night
- dwt204 5y agoThank you for the trip down memory lane.
- rasz 5y agoOn one hand super cool due to tricks employed, on the other CSS animations tend to be very power hungry https://www.bryanbraun.com/after-dark-css/all/rainstorm.html https://www.bryanbraun.com/after-dark-css/all/rainstorm.html takes <40% of idle low range gaming GPU = nothing, but 30% of one gaming 4GHz CPU thread, what is going on there? Chrome GPU process jumps between 20 an 40% while sliding 6 bitmaps around, something you could even do on a Virge in 1996. Some time ago I noticed an older 3GHz i5 laptop, otherwise perfectly usable, would start to struggle decoding h264 webcam stream because webmaster decided to use CSS animation for a scrolling title bar superimposed over video feed.
- nine_k 5y agoThat's why it's a good idea to develop for and test on outdated and underpowered hardware, or at least an emulator of it. Many of your customers won't have top-notch systems.
- rasz 5y agoThis might be a situation where we need to publicly shame Google into optimizing Chrome. Something akin to 1998 CSS1 Test Suite ACID tests https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/the-rise-of-css/ https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/the-rise-of-css/ making a case for IE/Netscape fixing their bad implementations.
- brundolf 5y agoI'd assume CSS animations would be much more efficient than JS-based animations because they can be entirely comprehended and executed by native code I wonder if there's some unnecessary reflow going on here? (reflow forces animations to happen on the CPU instead of the GPU)
- rasz 5y agoMe too. They were designed in a way any modern hardware Accelerated GUI 2D/3D engine should be able to perform them entirely in hardware with CPU just pre filling command lists. When I researched the problem I found they might be much leaner on Safari which isnt surprising considering they were proposed by WebKit in 2007, and Apple (in its fight vs Flash) would want them optimized for phone battery. On Chrome they are second class citizen. There isnt even a visibility check - CSS animation will run on 100% obscured or offscreen elements. You can edit .rain {top: -4800px; to top: 4800px, CPU utilization doesnt change. It sure feels like some procedure spinning in place burning CPU doing nothing. Just a reminder, Rain is implemented in a clever way, its blitting one 800x600 bitmap 6 times per animation frame to a frame buffer. Worst case scenario its 600MB/s fillrate done entirely by hardware accelerated 2D engine, yet Chrome is using ~30% of one 4GHz CPU core doing this. Hmm, maybe its reading buffer back from GPU and compositing in software? I did an experiment and deleted 5 of the 6 DIVs reducing load to 100MB/s fillrate and CPU utilization didnt even budge .... so Chrome is doing something stupid like reading GPU buffer back to main memory and pushing it to GPU again. This explains why my older i5 laptop was so loaded by stupid tiny text scroll.
- Imnimo 5y agoHonestly if you can't adjust the doneness of the toast with a little slider, is it really Flying Toasters?
- tablespoon 5y agoWhen I was a kind, I liked the Pyro! fish screensaver more than the After Dark one. Sure, it was in B&W instead of color, but when a bigger fish collided with a smaller fish, he'd eat it! Edit: here's a video where someone (who was probably -20 years old when it came out) demos it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyLtenNh7Sc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyLtenNh7Sc
- masswerk 5y agoBTW, since 1997: https://www.masswerk.at/flyer/ https://www.masswerk.at/flyer/ (Flying toaster images came apparently from there.)
- chmaynard 5y agoThe After Dark "Mandelbrot" screensaver introduced me to the beauty of fractals. Anyone know if the source code is available?
- Asooka 5y agoI browse with javascript disabled and this site works perfectly. Kudos for that!
- whoopdedo 5y agoThe first thing I tried to do is drag the title bar of that "window".
- rectangleboy 5y agoFlying toasters!
- k12sosse 5y agoNeeds more homer mowing the lawn in a moomoo.
- gnicholas 5y agoIs there a way to slow down the animation or make it more choppy, so it better recreates the experience of running After Dark on my Performa 25 years ago?
- rasz 5y agoopen devtools, edit CSS, speed is usually in seconds transformation takes, bigger number = slower EDIT: or even better document.getAnimations().forEach(animation => animation.playbackRate = 0.1) https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Animation https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Animation
- ChrisArchitect 5y ago(2014) please
- drvdevd 5y agoDid I miss the night city saver that’s pictured in the logo?? It’s my favorite and does not appear to me there…
- feiss 5y agoEverytime I passed this appliances store which had this small computer exhibited, I had to stop and stare thought the window for minutes to watch the flying toasters thingie. I was mesmerized. My 486 was nice, but that was sooo cool.. so high res and smooth..
- yuuta 5y agoI remembered the time when I was a kid, I was siting in my mom's office, in front of a Windows XP box and browsing through all different screensavers, themes, start button styles, etc. Good memories.
- thangalin 5y agohttps://uxfactor.ca/1151/ https://uxfactor.ca/1151/ I know one of the authors of Flying Toasters and sent him the link. Here's what he had to say: "It's a rough approximation, which is super cool, but misses all of the nuance. "You see, back in the day, there were very strong competitors to After Dark that had as much or more animations. The thing that set After Dark was a "je ne sais quoi" that felt like an elevated experience. Both the customers & the competitors thought this was some sort of accident, or that the animations were important, but neither of these things was true. "The secret was that people loved the nuance of interacting with the product (& subtlety in the animations) and it was very carefully designed with cognitive science. I pushed the team very hard before I would let anything be released because I insisted on the nuance."
- alexweber 5y agoThe first thing I looked for was to see if the toasters would roll, eject toast, flap faster, etc. I guess I'll have to fork it to add those features!
- rbanffy 5y agoI still have their Simpson's package for MacOS 7 macs... The Itchy and Scratchy one is the best. There was also a Windows (3.x) version.
- lvs 5y agoI'll just leave this here: https://schwal10.github.io/lunatic-fringe/ https://schwal10.github.io/lunatic-fringe/
- topdownjimmy 5y agoIf Berkeley Systems reproduced these screensavers for modern Macs and sold them in the Mac App Store for ten bucks, they would make an absolute killing.