
Aggressively Stupid: The Story Behind After Dark (2007) - kmooney
http://lowendmac.com/2007/aggressively-stupid-the-story-behind-after-dark/
======
salgernon
I worked at Berkeley Systems from 1991 to 1994ish. I wasn't originally hired
to work on screen savers, but as side projects failed, we all ended up doing
so. (I got the job in part because I'd worked with Patrick Naughton at Sun on
xlock at Sun.)

I ended up writing the After Dark 3.0 engine for Mac, which was a lot of fun
because I wrote it as an application and then figured out how to make it run
within the context of the frontmost application without affecting it. It only
patched 5 system traps rather than the 20+ traps the previous engine patched.

We were in constant competition with an Apple Engineer named Tom Dowdy that
had a freeware product "Dark Side of the Mac" that patched no traps at all -
patching was always blamed for system instability.

It seems like so much work went into something really small... I remember
countless overnights, costo runs, alcohol, and a dead hamster named Trurl.

~~~
mrpippy
Fascinating! Do you remember which traps you patched? :) jGNEFilter?

~~~
st3fan
jGNEFilter was not a trap but a low memory pointer to a function to intercept
or filter events.

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cardiffspaceman
Another way of looking at this is that the end of screen savers means the end
of a small culture.

I don't remember where I got this idea but I coded up a screensaver very
quickly once. The idea was it periodically would make a 1/2 x 1/2 size copy of
the screen and then copy it to the bottom right, bottom left and top center of
the screen. This converges on a fixpoint called the Serpinski Gasket. On
Windows it was pretty easy to write such screen savers. I'd be interested in
doing it under X Windows but the people who maintain X Windows (or DEs) are
not interested in maintaining end-user-facing variety in screen savers. And if
you can do it it means that rogue software can exfiltrate image captures of
your running programs.

I also want to quickly mention PointCast [1] as an example of another current
in the screensaver sea.

[1][https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PointCast_(dotcom)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PointCast_\(dotcom\))

~~~
pavel_lishin
Could you write it for XSCreensaver?

~~~
cardiffspaceman
> _Could you write it for XSCreensaver?_

Probably. A deeper answer would be off-topic, in my judgement.

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Theodores
The author does not write about the broader context of the demise of the
screen saver. Energy Star played a part, who needs their monitor on anyway?

Operating Systems also came with their own screen savers plus the people that
liked screen savers were not prone to buying software, usually software was
pirated or unlicensed in the 90s. Therefore this crowd were happy with openGL
Windows screen savers. This was during a time when the Mac barely existed in
the corporate world.

Really this product should never have existed and we should have moved to
modern power management of monitors 30 years ago. Think of the electricity
that could have been saved.

~~~
soylentcola
And now we live in a time when I regularly hear people refer to their desktop
wallpaper as their "screen saver" at work. I'm occasionally tempted to point
out that a static wallpaper is the complete opposite of a screen saver, but
then I remember that nobody likes a pedant (even an accurate one).

~~~
ryandrake
> I remember that nobody likes a pedant (even an accurate one).

It's just that nobody likes being corrected. Try correcting someone's spelling
or grammar on any Internet forum (including HN), and you'll be hit with a
barrage of "you know what I meant" and "language changes" retorts.

~~~
iainmerrick
> > I remember that nobody likes a pedant (even an accurate one).

> It's just that nobody likes being corrected.

Nice one.

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carsongross
If you are sufficiently old and autistic, you can still buy the licensed
flying toasters screen saver from a Japanese company called infinisys:

[http://en.infinisys.co.jp/product/flyingtoasters/index.shtml](http://en.infinisys.co.jp/product/flyingtoasters/index.shtml)

I was.

~~~
pavel_lishin
I'm less interested in Flying Toasters, than I am in the rest of the After
Dark collection, which I _would_ pay for if I could find in its entirety.

~~~
ashark
You can't. About a year ago I went looking for a big collection of at least
the most popular ones, if not all of them, ready to drop $20 or so and fully
expecting it to be available. They're not, so now I just have flying toasters.

~~~
pavel_lishin
There must be someone out there who's got spare time, an old Mac, After Dark -
and the willingness to port 'em.

------
timthorn
How can the article not mention Pyro!? There was some tribal attachment to
your screensaver, if I remember right, and I was on the Pyro! side...

[http://www.nytimes.com/1989/04/02/business/the-executive-
com...](http://www.nytimes.com/1989/04/02/business/the-executive-computer-how-
to-extend-a-monitor-s-life.html)

~~~
yvhhjbb
The writing style of that article was excellent. No flourish, no bullshit.
Also:

> An aside about clocks: This is as good a time as any to reset your
> computer's internal clock. For I.B.M. and I.B.M.-compatible machines, type
> ''TIME'' at the DOS prompt, and for Macs bring up the control panel. Then
> call 900-410-8463. You'll get a recording from the United States Naval
> Observatory's atomic clock, and you can't get much more accurate than that.
> The call costs 50 cents.

Does it still work?

~~~
phonon
+1 202 762-1401 (Washington, D.C.) +1 202 762-1069 +1 719 567-6742 (Colorado
Springs)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Naval_Observator...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Naval_Observatory#Time_service)

------
JoeDaDude
Nostalgia rush! One of my first programs was an After Dark screen saver
module. I implemented randomly flipping Truchet Tiles [1] in Pascal.

[1].
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truchet_tiles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truchet_tiles)

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DonutATX
Oh man, these were cash cows. $24.99 for the one my company did, it came on
three floppy disks. But, if you had our games installed, it would use their
art resources for more screensavers!

[http://www.old-games.com/download/5742/origin-fx](http://www.old-
games.com/download/5742/origin-fx)

------
maxxxxx
I just want the "Lunatic Fringe" game back!

~~~
pavel_lishin
There's a github repo trying to rewrite it for the web:
[https://github.com/jackinloadup/lunatic-
fringe](https://github.com/jackinloadup/lunatic-fringe)

There's also this, which I vaguely remember working for me years ago, but
can't vouch for now:
[http://www.sealiesoftware.com/fringe/](http://www.sealiesoftware.com/fringe/)

I have incredibly fond memories of playing Lunatic Fringe, despite being very
bad at it, and despite catching a ridiculously bad case of strep throat one
year shortly after discovering it, and having some bad, vaguely-related fever
dreams about.

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tracker1
Man, I kind of bemoan the loss of the screen savers... it's a pain to get them
running everywhere now. Windows 10 buried it, and seems to reset it on
occasion. Ubuntu, you have to install the X screensaver, and change some
settings... Mac, not even sure anymore.

I always liked the screensavers, and still do. I use a gaming-friendly 4K TV
for my PC monitor at home, and without the screensaver, it shuts off, and
doesn't come back on, without the remote.

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JoeAltmaier
I was one of those that never got it. Never wanted stuff on my screen 'after
dark'. Never saw the point of 'saving the screen' by using it? Totally baffled
by the entire culture.

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Marc66FR
I used Afrer Dark as well but prefered Johnny on his desert island :-)

