![]() As computers become more widespread and common in households, it made no sense to leave so much power on doing nothing. Imagine having current stocks displayed on your screen while your computer sat “unused”. So now we know why screen savers existed and why they were so darn cool.Īfter a while, they got real interesting such as 3d mazes and cool art, even live data from the internet would function as a screensaver. I mean, would YOU want a boring black background, or cool stars flying through your space on your desktop? I think the choice is obvious. Developed with the intention to blank out your screen after a certain period of time, or display other cool and fun images / moving pixels, this feature could prevent the same image being stuck on your screen while keeping you and your computer entertained. However, before technology could step in and save the day, how would we come up with a Screen Saving feature? A workaround that could prevent Burn in? ![]() ![]() Granted you needed a LONG time to burn in an image on your screen, I still remember that only school computers did this because my CRT was new enough to afford a Sleep feature to turn off automatically and refresh whenever it needed to avoid this. Today’s LCD and LED screens don’t suffer from that, maybe stuck or dead pixels, but not an entire image ghosted in your screen while you did some work! This only happened if you left your monitor on too long. These monsters not only took up a long time to power on but would suffer “Burn in” from a static image such as your taskbar, Windows logo, or a window icon on your desktop which could “freeze” a shadow on your CRT monitor and leave a ghost impression. Let’s start with the reason screensavers existed before.īack in the day, computers used to rely on big, wasteful clunky CRT Cathode Ray Tube monitors to display information from your PC. What has changed? Technology that’s what changed. It didn't help that the official Windows screensaver API made it difficult to write a screen saver using Direct3D.I remember my Elementary school and the computer lab had these amazing distracting images of scenes that would flicker ALL day long until school was over and the teacher shut them down for the night, only to start them up again the next school day. There were at least some third-party screensavers that used Direct3D, but they were very uncommon. You can only use it if you have the DirectX SDK installed. There was a painfully slow reference rasterizer before that, but it has never been part of Windows or the DirectX end-user installs. Direct3D never got a practical software renderer that you could use in production applications until Windows 7. While DirectX became a standard part of Windows with Windows 95 OSR2, by the time you could pretty much always depend on 3D hardware support (some time during the Windows XP era), these screensavers were no longer being included with Windows. In theory, these screensavers could have been rewritten to use Direct3D in later releases of Windows, but that never happened. (In fact, I'm not sure there was any hardware support for OpenGL on Windows 95 when it first came out.)Īt least some of these 3D screensavers-in particular, 3D Pipes-were actually introduced in Windows NT 3.5, a year before Windows 95 came out. On the other hand, OpenGL could fall back to software rending if hardware acceleration wasn't available. This was a virtual necessity for two reasons: (1) the original version of Windows 95 didn't ship with any version of DirectX, and (2) the Direct3D API required hardware acceleration that most PCs of the time wouldn't have had. All of the classic 3D screensavers (3D Maze, 3D Pipes, 3D Flying Objects, 3D Text, and 3D Flower Box) used OpenGL instead of DirectX.
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