Here is Starry Night
Berkeley Systems “After Dark” screensavers recreated in CSS
71–80 of 153 posts
Re: Berkeley Systems “After Dark” screensavers recreated in CSS
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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?
CRTS couldn't really show "black". It was more of a dull gray. That's what made the plasma display so amazing with it's true black. LEDs and now OLED are the same except they do not ahve the mass of a dying star.
That's not how CRT physics works.
The screen is charged. That charge causes burn in. The best way to not burn in, short of turning the screen off, is to charge the screen as little as possible. The least charge you can give it is a black signal, which means least burn in.
Re: Berkeley Systems “After Dark” screensavers recreated in CSS
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
Screensavers 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 hav…
In 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.
It's my last day at my current job. Thank you for inspiring me to set up a 1 minute BSOD screensaver for the next person who uses my current workstation.
Re: Berkeley Systems “After Dark” screensavers recreated in CSS
#74Thank you for the trip down memory lane.
Re: Berkeley Systems “After Dark” screensavers recreated in CSS
#75On 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
takes 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.
Re: Berkeley Systems “After Dark” screensavers recreated in CSS
#76When 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). The…
RIP Tom Dowdy
Tom was a good guy.
Re: Berkeley Systems “After Dark” screensavers recreated in CSS
#77Honestly if you can't adjust the doneness of the toast with a little slider, is it really Flying Toasters?
Re: Berkeley Systems “After Dark” screensavers recreated in CSS
#78When 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
Re: Berkeley Systems “After Dark” screensavers recreated in CSS
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
CRTS couldn't really show "black". It was more of a dull gray. That's what made the plasma display so amazing with it's true black. LEDs and now OLED are the same except they do not ahve the mass of a dying star.
That's not how CRT physics works. The screen is charged. That charge causes burn in. The best way to not burn in, short of turning the screen off, is to charge the screen as little as possible. The least charge you can give it is a black signal, which means least burn in.
>The least charge you can give it is a black signal
The point is that you could not give it no signal without it being off. LEDs can do this. The closest to black from a CRT I saw was from Sony's Professional Studio reference monitors that were $32K for a 32" screen. When Sony brought out their OLED reference monitors, they did a side-by-side comparisson of their best CRT, an LCD and the new OLED. All 3 were receiving the same signal, and when the demo started black, the CRT was clearly "on" but the OLED looked "off" with the LCD in between. Just about the time I'm thinking to myself that the CRT brightness was turned up, they switched to reference bars and all were calibrated correctly.
Arguing that CRTs could display true black is arguing against history.
Re: Berkeley Systems “After Dark” screensavers recreated in CSS
#80Someone 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.
Reminds me of a Kurt Vonnegut story about going to the post office to mail a letter https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9299135
> 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.