Oh the 3d pipes screensaver. When I was 15, in high school, we had to spent 1 week every year in apprenticeship in some field-related company. Me and two other classmate went to one small telecommunication firm. On the first day boss called us to the conference room and told us to sit down. I sat on the nearest chair, the boss leaned to me and whispered to my ear "that's my chair!". Then he gave us notebook with 10 minute ISDN presentation and left. He said he will be back after 8 hours. We watched it 2-3 times, then out of boredom we were checking new screensavers in brand new windows and we spent good two hours watching the pipes screensaver. We forget to turn it back, when boss returned, the notebook wake up from sleep, shortly flashed pipes screensaver and then showed ISDN presentation. "You changed the screensaver? Get the hell out of here!". And fired us. We spent the rest of the week slacking in the town and then made some bullshit made up report about ISDN afterwards. Good times.
No discussion of the 3D screensavers in NT is completely w/o recalling the Customer who called re: their server being slow. The technician we sent to look at it couldn't find any performance indicators amiss when he ran Perfmon on the server's console. The Customer was shocked at how well the server was running while the technician checked it out.
Shortly after he'd left the site the Customer called complaining that the server was "running slow" again. We paged the technician to turn back. He checked it again and still found nothing wrong. It was mysteriously fast again, too. That observation set the wheels in motion for an eventual diagnosis.
I tried to leave a BSOD screensaver for my replacement at my old job. I found dozens of candidates but none of them would run in Windows 10. Windows 10 built-in screen savers don't properly work with multiple monitors. I know the demand for screensavers is extremely low, but I was surprised that the OS with the best reputation for legacy support couldn't keep screensaver libraries working.
The modern replacement for screensavers is on Steam:
Wallpaper Engine
https://store.steampowered.com/app/431960/Wallpaper_Engine/
These run on your Windows background, can include 3D and you can edit your own "live" images w/ particle effects, animated layers, warping, waves and more. Of course, the community has created hundreds of wallpapers you can download.
the best one on windows was made by the sysinternals people. it would identify the exact version of windows and do full version-faithful bootloops (bios, startup, crash, everything) and even had the option to generate fake disk activity for extra believability. i think they had to give it up after they got acquired by the mothership though. (not totally surprising, or unreasonable really)
Oh man, that damn screensaver. I tried to use it many times back in the day, but it always had some problem that would crash my OS and I had to reboot it. I was surprised that a screensaver even can crash an OS.
Then, one day, I realized what it was supposed to do..
Just make sure you paste the link into your URL bar instead of clicking it, lest the HN referrer lead your browser astray.
Funny thing is, I knew about that trap when I posted the link, and actually included this warning – but when I tested it, the site loaded fine, so I edited my comment to remove the warning. Some sneaky tricks being played!
Very nice, it brought memories, although it wasn't my favorite screensaver back then. I found the Serenescreen aquarium to be relaxing (child memories: my father had multiple real tropical fishes aquariums I loved to stare at), and then there was that spectacular screensaver with changing complex high res graphics (for the time, circa 1999) that I can't recall the name, they weren't fractals though.
I love the ability to control the camera on this one though.
A couple possible improvements: make pipes multicolored by slowly shifting components, and set up pipes so that after some random time a pipe starts shorting from the end at random speed, sort of a reverse-centipede, so eventually it will disappear allowing space for other pipes without the need to continuously refresh the screen.
