They were also computationally random: Rather than run the toasters on a track where the sequence would repeat itself, the images were aimlessly generated so that no two scenes would ever be the same. The screensavers were abstract and unknowable on purpose - it was baked into their design. In a 2007 interview with Low End Mac, Jack Eastman - an engineer who worked on “After Dark” at Berkeley Systems - said that even as the screensaver market boomed and expanded, the stated goal of the designers was to always remain “aggressively stupid.”
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Those toasters in particular were part of a series of computer screensaver software created by the Bay Area-based Berkeley Systems, originally developed in 1989 for the Apple Macintosh and later introduced to Windows in the early 90s. Screensavers, you might have noticed, are basically obsolete these days, and it’s because the problem that once necessitated them no longer exists. The 3D maze offered by Windows 95 was the best and the weirdest screensaver of its day, but it wasn’t the only avant-garde option to choose from: there were endlessly proliferating neon pipes, a haunted house where the lights flickered on and off, a swarm of winged toasters that flew through the black night alongside bagels and toast. Thus, the screensaver was born, and for whatever reason, there was no shortage of whimsy when it came to creating them. If a computer was left on for too long, the phosphor would create what’s known as “burn-in” - a ghostly imprint on the glass that held the shape of whatever was being displayed at the time the burn occurred. Although we’re spoiled today with tidy, energy-efficient LCD displays, early computers showed us images by projecting phosphor onto the screen through cathode ray tubes. It always felt like something important was about to reveal itself to you around the next turn, but it never did. There was so much mystery in that weird little maze - its specificity made it feel like a fully-formed world, one with stakes and rules that you weren’t quite allowed or supposed to understand. I can remember being seven or eight years old and sitting very still near the computer, blessed with an attention span that hadn’t yet been ravaged by later iterations of the internet, careful not to disturb the mouse as the screen on our family desktop blinked off. To reiterate: This was a screensaver in 1999, and not an Academy Award-winning film directed by acclaimed director Guillermo del Toro. Collide with the floating grey polyhedrons and the maze will turn on itself so that the ceiling becomes the floor intercept the smiley face - is it cute or vaguely threatening? - and you’ll be sent back to the beginning.
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Your path is full of strange, seemingly unrelated objects: an abstract mural of a globe sitting beside an open window appears repeatedly along the walls and, deeper into the maze, a 2D rat patrols the halls, comically overlarge and with white around the edges, as if he was pasted in from another program as a careless afterthought. This notably isn’t a hedge maze, where you can peer over the rows in search of an exit - the brick walls stretch all the way up to meet a grey ceiling, giving the space a vaguely subterranean quality.Īs you begin to lurch along, the maze follows only right turns, winding you through a dizzying series of low-res corridors in an attempt to find an exit. Red brick walls rise up around you on either side, and the Windows Start menu icon flutters in front of you.
Maybe that’s why, more than anything, I miss the 3D Maze screensaver from Windows 95.įor the uninitiated: At the beginning of the maze - the moment your computer shudders to sleep - you, “the player,” are standing on a dirt floor.
The internet was still steeped in all of its weird, early glory, coated wall-to-wall in clunky pixel art, dead GeoCities pages and unwelcome porn popups, and its unregulated weirdness was mirrored in the operating systems of the day. In the 1990s, computers were like portals to a fever dream.
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