Rare old school IT professionals still remember the practical value of early screensavers. The cradle of modern computers in early 1990 was also the cradle of early PC monitors.
In the past the computer was used for rare and special operations till World Wide Web brought the new kind of addiction to the developed nations � surfing the web. The mission of the first screensaver was clear and simple. They were a product of a pure necessity.
The cause of the problem was technologies used in monitors of that time. PC screens that were left on for hours were subject to a danger of permanent damage. A phenomenon called phosphoric burn would cause the last picture on your screen to burn into the surface of the monitor and stay there forever. Technology could not cope with that phenomenon so another kind of invention has been searched for.
For those days a hardware solution simply could not be produced. A fantastic non-hardware product swiped away every monitor related worry of those days.
That is when first screensavers saw the light of the day. At the start it was just letters or simple signs cruising through screen or bouncing around.
While windows OS gained tremendously on market share and were subject to substantial investments, majority of worlds PC monitors stayed BW far into 1990s. That difference between technological progresses in software vs. hardware regarding PC monitors somehow helped screensavers to overgrow their initial purpose. Today there are no computer monitors that would suffer a phosphorus burn in even if you leave them on for days.
It would certainly be ecologically more responsible to use the power saving function which turns off inactive PC and darkens or turns of the monitor as well. While early screensavers had a clear mission of protecting a PC monitor, modern screensavers are there to entertain.
If once a couple of short hickuping sentences were enough, today a screensaver has to be at least partly animated to be selected by PC users. The direct user experience has become the deciding factor. One has to be at least shocked, touched, relaxed, entertained or brought to laugh in order to categorize a screensaver as successful. It started with simple graphics and came to highly advanced software.
World Wide Web opened its doors to all sorts of software that brings most unbelievable solutions to ones PC monitor. A look at interactive screensavers with animation reveals the future lines of modern animated screensavers.
Regardless to where the software geeks of the future will take us with their new products, each and every single phase in evolution of this software gains a mass of loyal users and it is hard to imagine that any of different kinds of screensavers will ever loose their charms.
Perhaps the biggest boost for further experiments with this kind of software is the same old internet that made it so popular from the start. We live in the society where all payable software solutions have their free alternatives. Majority of web searches for screensavers is concentrated on words free and animated.
There is no such thing as free lunch, but this does not count for screensavers.
The money for making new screensavers comes from free software providers which attach their software into the package with the downloaded screensaver. Whichever way the future of screensavers my take us; it seems the user will continue to enjoy free products for a long time to come.
We can all look forward to new ideas which will soon be conquering PC screens worldwide.
The quality of a screensaver is measured far more by end user experience than solely by animation and graphics. We should not be supprised to see in the future screensavers evolving from one-way media to two-way communication media.
Feel the effects of
funny free animated screensavers on your daily stress at work or at home.
