You Used to Pay Fifty Bucks for Animated Toasters
Picture this: 1994. You're in a CompUSA, wandering past towers of shrink-wrapped software boxes, and you stop at a display that's running a screensaver. Not just any screensaver. Chrome toasters with little wings are flying across a pitch-black monitor, gliding alongside slices of toast at varying levels of doneness. There's a crowd of maybe four or five people just standing there, watching. Mesmerized. By toasters.
And then someone picks up the box, reads the back, sees the $49.95 price tag, and buys it. For a screensaver. This actually happened. Millions of times.
If you grew up in the 1990s, screensavers weren't just background noise. They were a thing. A hobby. A personality statement. The screensaver you chose said something about you. Were you a 3D Pipes person? A Starfield guy? Did you spring for After Dark and its legendary Flying Toasters? Or were you the kid whose dad left the default Windows marquee scrolling "Hello World" across a beige CRT monitor in the den?
Today, screensavers are basically extinct. Most people under 25 have never intentionally set one. Windows still technically has them buried in the settings, but they're an afterthought, a relic sitting in the same drawer as fax machine drivers and Internet Explorer shortcuts. So what happened? How did an entire category of software go from cultural phenomenon to digital ghost?
To answer that, you have to go back to when screens actually needed saving.
Burn-In Was Real, and It Was Terrifying
Here's something younger people don't realize: screensavers weren't invented as entertainment. They were invented out of genuine necessity. CRT monitors, those big, heavy, glass-fronted boxes that took up half your desk and weighed about thirty pounds, had a very real problem called phosphor burn-in.
The way a CRT worked was pretty brutal. An electron gun at the back of the tube fired a beam at a layer of phosphor coating on the inside of the glass. When the beam hit the phosphor, it glowed. That glow was your image. But here's the problem: if the same image sat on the screen for hours, the phosphor in those spots would degrade permanently. The image would literally burn itself into the glass. You could turn the monitor off and still see a ghost of whatever had been displayed.
This was especially bad in offices. If a secretary left a WordPerfect menu on screen overnight, by morning there'd be a permanent shadow of that menu bar etched into the monitor. Banks, airports, libraries, anywhere with a computer running the same display for hours on end was at risk. Replacing a CRT monitor in the late 1980s could cost $300 to $500, which is roughly $700 to $1,100 in today's dollars. Burn-in wasn't just annoying. It was expensive.
The first screensaver was written by a programmer named John Socha and published in the December 1983 issue of Softalk magazine. It was called SCRNSAVE, and all it did was blank the screen after three minutes of inactivity. That's it. No flying toasters. No morphing shapes. Just darkness. And for a while, that was enough.
Berkeley Systems Turned Screen Protection Into Entertainment
The real transformation started in 1989, when a small company in Berkeley, California called Berkeley Systems released a product called After Dark for the Apple Macintosh. The founders, Wes Boyd and Joan Blades (who would later go on to found MoveOn.org, which is a wild career pivot), had a simple insight: if people had to have something running on their screens to prevent burn-in, why not make it fun?
After Dark shipped with a collection of animated screensaver modules, and users could pick their favorite. There was a bouncing ball. There was a module called Lunatic Fringe, which was basically a full space combat game disguised as a screensaver. There was one that simulated rain on the screen. But the star of the show, the one that turned After Dark from a utility into a phenomenon, was Flying Toasters.
The story behind Flying Toasters is almost too simple. Engineer Jack Eastman was working late one night, wandered into the kitchen, saw a toaster sitting on the counter, and imagined what it would look like with wings. That was it. That's the whole origin story. He coded it up, gave the toasters chrome bodies and stubby little bird wings, added slices of toast at various levels of doneness floating alongside them, and created one of the most recognizable images in 1990s computing.
After Dark retailed for around $30 to $50 depending on the version, and people paid it gladly. By the mid-1990s, Berkeley Systems had grown to about 120 employees and was pulling in roughly $30 million in annual revenue. Thirty million dollars. For screensavers. There was even a slider in the Flying Toasters module that let you adjust the darkness of the toast, which is maybe the most 1990s feature ever designed.
The Deluxe version added a Flying Toasters Pro module with a choice of background music: either Richard Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries or an original flying toaster anthem with optional karaoke lyrics. I am not making this up. There were karaoke lyrics for animated flying toasters. And people loved it.
Windows Made Screensavers Universal
While Berkeley Systems was selling screensavers as a premium product, Microsoft was about to make them free. Windows 3.1, released in 1992, included a handful of built-in screensavers, and suddenly every PC on the planet had access to them without paying a dime. The selection was modest: Marquee (scrolling text), Mystify (bouncing geometric shapes), Starfield (flying through space), and a few others. They were simple, but they were there.
Then Windows 95 arrived in August 1995, and the screensaver game changed completely.
The story of how Windows got its most famous screensavers involves the OpenGL team at Microsoft, and it starts with a technical demo that wasn't supposed to ship. When Windows NT 3.5 was being developed, the team needed a way to showcase OpenGL, the 3D graphics technology that was being built into the operating system. Writing a full application was too risky because it might have bugs that would delay the release. But a screensaver? A screensaver was low stakes. If it crashed, nothing important happened. Your computer just went back to showing the desktop.
So the Windows OpenGL team built a series of 3D screensavers as tech demos: 3D Text, 3D Flying Objects, 3D Maze, and the one that became an absolute legend, 3D Pipes. A member of the marketing team saw them, thought they were cool, and decided to include them in the shipping product. And just like that, some of the most iconic screensavers in computing history were born from what was essentially a side project.
3D Pipes was hypnotic. It drew an endless, slowly growing network of connected pipes in three dimensions, changing colors at each joint, occasionally throwing in a teapot-shaped connector (an inside joke referencing the Utah Teapot, one of the most famous test objects in computer graphics history). People would sit and watch it for minutes at a time, which is exactly the opposite of what screensavers were supposed to do. The whole point was that nobody should be looking at the screen.
3D Maze was equally mesmerizing. It generated a random first-person maze and then "walked" through it, turning corners, hitting dead ends, and occasionally finding its way to the exit before starting over. If you were a kid in the late 1990s, you probably spent at least one afternoon staring at 3D Maze hoping you could somehow take control and navigate it yourself.
The Golden Age: When Screensavers Were a Culture
By the mid to late 1990s, screensavers had evolved far beyond burn-in prevention. They were entertainment. They were art. They were, in some offices, a form of passive-aggressive self-expression. The IT guy who put the Matrix digital rain screensaver on his monitor was making a statement. The receptionist with the tropical fish aquarium was making a different one.
Third-party screensavers became a massive market. Companies like Sierra On-Line got into the game. In 1993, Sierra's subsidiary Dynamix released Johnny Castaway, which was arguably the most ambitious screensaver ever made. Instead of abstract shapes or animated objects, Johnny Castaway told a story. A little cartoon man was stranded on a tiny desert island, and over time, different things would happen to him: he'd try to fish, build a raft, encounter a mermaid, deal with storms, even celebrate holidays in real time. It was like a tiny sitcom running in the corner of your screen. People in offices would check on Johnny throughout the day to see what he was up to. A screensaver with a fan following. That happened.
The late 1990s also brought the era of themed screensavers tied to movies, TV shows, and brands. There were screensavers for The X-Files, Star Wars, Star Trek, Jurassic Park, and basically anything with a marketing budget. You could download them from the internet (slowly, over dial-up), and installing a screensaver from a random website was one of the great acts of faith in early internet computing. Half the time, the screensaver worked fine. The other half, you'd accidentally installed a toolbar, three pop-up ad generators, and something called BonziBuddy.
There were also the aquarium screensavers, which deserve their own paragraph. A former Air Force pilot named Jim Sachs was so disappointed with the aquarium screensaver that shipped with Windows 95 that he started building his own. His creation, SereneScreen Marine Aquarium, became one of the most popular paid screensavers of all time, running for over 25 years. He hand-rendered every fish, every coral, every bubble. People paid real money for a digital fish tank on their monitor. And it was beautiful. It genuinely was.
The Death Sentence: LCD Screens Didn't Need Saving
The beginning of the end for screensavers came from, of all places, the display technology industry. Throughout the late 1990s and into the 2000s, LCD monitors began replacing CRTs. And LCD screens don't use phosphor. They use liquid crystals illuminated by a backlight. There's no electron beam burning anything. There's no phosphor degradation. Which means there's no burn-in.
Well, technically, LCDs can develop something called image persistence if a static image is displayed for extremely long periods, but it's temporary and usually fixes itself. It's nothing like the permanent scarring that CRTs suffered from. The fundamental technological reason for screensavers to exist just vanished.
On top of that, power management got smarter. Instead of keeping the monitor on and running a screensaver, operating systems started just turning the monitor off after a period of inactivity. Which makes way more sense, when you think about it. Why run an animated program that uses CPU cycles and keeps the screen lit when you could just turn the screen off and save electricity? Energy Star compliance standards pushed manufacturers and OS developers in this direction, and by the mid-2000s, "turn off monitor" had replaced "run screensaver" as the default power setting on most new PCs.
Windows Vista in 2007 was really where the shift became obvious. The built-in screensavers were afterthoughts. Some of the classics were gone. 3D Pipes was removed. 3D Maze was removed. The OpenGL screensavers that a generation had grown up watching were simply deleted from the operating system and never came back. Microsoft replaced them with some gentle, forgettable options like Bubbles and Ribbons. It was like replacing a vintage jukebox with a Bluetooth speaker playing elevator music.
Windows 10 and 11 still technically support screensavers, but the feature is buried deep in the settings. Most users never touch it. The default is "None." The screen just goes to sleep.
The Screensaver Economy Collapsed Almost Overnight
For Berkeley Systems, the end came before the LCD transition even finished. In 1997, the company was acquired by Sierra On-Line (which was itself part of CUC International, later Cendant, which turned out to be one of the largest accounting fraud cases in American corporate history at the time, but that's another story). Sierra was eventually absorbed into what became Sierra Entertainment under Vivendi Universal Games, and After Dark just sort of disappeared into the corporate shuffle.
The entire paid screensaver market collapsed. Why would anyone pay $50 for software that their operating system now included for free, to protect a screen that no longer needed protecting? Third-party screensaver companies that had thrived in the early and mid-1990s either pivoted to other products or simply closed. The category didn't slowly decline. It fell off a cliff.
Screensavers had been a multi-hundred-million-dollar global market in the 1990s when you add up retail sales, corporate licensing, and bundled deals. By 2005, the market was essentially zero. That's one of the fastest category extinctions in software history.
The Weird Afterlife of Screensavers
But here's the thing about screensavers: they never fully died. They just transformed.
Apple's tvOS includes screensavers as a feature, those beautiful slow-motion aerial videos of cities, landscapes, and oceans that play on your Apple TV when it's idle. They're essentially screensavers, just rebranded. Nobody calls them that, but that's what they are.
Windows 11's lock screen with its rotating Bing wallpapers and Spotlight images is, functionally, a screensaver with extra steps. Samsung and LG smart TVs have ambient modes that display art or photographs when the TV is idle. Roku has aquarium and fireplace channels. The concept survived. The name didn't.
And retro computing enthusiasts have kept the originals alive. You can still download and run the classic After Dark modules through Internet Archive. Web developers have recreated 3D Pipes in JavaScript that runs in your browser. There's even an open-source project that faithfully recreates the Windows 95 3D Maze screensaver. People build these things not because they need screensavers, but because they miss them. Because watching 3D Pipes grow across a screen for five minutes is oddly meditative in a way that doomscrolling through social media will never be.
What Screensavers Were Really About
Here's what I think people actually miss about screensavers, and it's not the software itself. It's the moment. Screensavers activated when you walked away from your computer. When you went to the kitchen. When you took a phone call. When you just stopped and did something else for a while. They were visual evidence that you had stepped away from the machine.
Today, screens never go idle because we never stop looking at them. We go from laptop to phone to tablet to TV and back again. There's no moment where the computer sits there, unattended, doing its own little thing. The screensaver was, in a weird way, a reminder that it was okay to not be looking at a screen. It was the computer's way of saying, "I'm fine. Go live your life. I'll be here when you get back."
Flying Toasters weren't just flying toasters. They were the visual equivalent of a deep breath. And maybe that's why, twenty-five years after they stopped mattering, people still remember them so fondly.
Because sometimes, the best thing your computer ever did for you was the thing it did when you weren't watching.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why were screensavers invented?
Screensavers were invented to prevent phosphor burn-in on CRT monitors. When a static image was displayed for too long, it would permanently etch itself into the screen. The first screensaver, SCRNSAVE, was written by John Socha in 1983 and simply blanked the display after three minutes of inactivity.
What was the Flying Toasters screensaver?
Flying Toasters was the most famous module in Berkeley Systems' After Dark screensaver software, first released in 1989 for Macintosh and 1991 for Windows. It featured chrome toasters with bird-like wings flying across the screen alongside toast. Engineer Jack Eastman created it after seeing a toaster in a kitchen during a late-night coding session.
Why did Windows remove 3D Pipes and 3D Maze?
Microsoft removed the classic OpenGL screensavers (3D Pipes, 3D Maze, 3D Flying Objects, and 3D Text) starting with Windows Vista in 2007. As LCD monitors replaced CRTs, the practical need for screensavers disappeared. Microsoft shifted toward power management features that simply turned monitors off instead.
Do modern monitors need screensavers?
No. LCD and LED monitors don't suffer from phosphor burn-in the way CRTs did. LCDs can develop temporary image persistence from very long static displays, but it typically resolves on its own. OLED screens can experience burn-in, but modern OLED devices include built-in mitigation features like pixel shifting.
Can you still get classic screensavers today?
Yes. The original After Dark modules are available through the Internet Archive. Web developers have recreated classics like 3D Pipes and 3D Maze in browser-compatible formats. Retro computing communities maintain collections of classic Windows and Mac screensavers that can still run on modern systems with compatibility tools.
How much did screensavers cost in the 1990s?
Berkeley Systems' After Dark retailed for roughly $30 to $50 depending on the version. The company generated approximately $30 million in annual revenue by the mid-1990s from screensaver sales alone. Other premium screensaver packages from companies like Sierra On-Line were priced similarly.