10. Screen Effects

“Somebody save me.”

—Remy Zero

Screensavers have been around since the first screen needed saving. Today, however, they are used more for fun than necessity. Back in the day of monochrome monitors, if you left a command prompt (or a menu bar) on the screen for a long period of time, you would suffer from the dreaded burn-in. The image on the screen would be permanently burned into the monitor. Screensavers would blank the screen and display moving objects so that you would still know the computer was running, but it wouldn't suffer from this horrible fate.

In the early days of the Macintosh, two popular screensavers came to life: Pyro, which made great looking fireworks and After Dark, which started the screensaver module revolution. ...

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