The origin of 3D Pipes, Windows' best screensaver Microsoft veteran Raymond Chen has shared the origin story behind the Windows 3D Pipes screensaver. Windows 3D Pipes screensaver Windows 3D Pipes screensaver – Pic: Richard Speed Readers of a particular vintage might remember staring at the maze of pipes generated by the screensaver in early versions of Windows. According …
... is of several customer sites having kittens about terrible performance in networked applications, going out to the site, waggling the mouse on the server to stop the 3D screensaver hoovering up all the CPU, saying "problem solved?" followed by "Don't enable any screensaver other than a blank screen on servers."
He had bought a large map representing the sea, Without the least vestige of land: And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be A map they could all understand.
"What's the good of Mercator's North Poles and Equators, Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?" So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply "They are merely conventional signs!
"Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes! But we've got our brave Captain to thank (So the crew would protest) "that he's bought us the best— A perfect and absolute blank!"
(With apologies for the formatting)
Curses, my 19th century reference has been beaten by a 16th century one (but both during the reign of queens).
Hmm, there must be a relevant quip from Boudica's court; Tacitus was always good for a pithy line, that bit about Veranius harrying the Silurians always gets a chuckle...
Blank screen?
You were lucky! We 'ad to cut out 'ole from old piece o'cardboard and hang it on t'pit wall if *we* wanted a blank screen.
In Sundays, management would roll us up longwise and we 'ad to play t'role o'pipes for 'em, rolling down slag heap so as to seem 3D. Though, to be fair, they did warm up teapot in Winter, to stop it sticking and rolling down t'hill before they'd had a cup.
Really Slick Screensavers blows every Windows NT screensaver out of the water with direct OpenGL access. If you add a module for audio, you can get also the Fireworks blowing up audio in its specific screensaver.
These will actually use 3D acceleration in modern graphic cards with OpenGL support. They are on sourceforge now.
The true origin of Windows bloat is finally explained. I bet that became a catchphrase there.
3D pipes may well have been inspired by a CAD program that I used at university in the early 90s. It ran on expensive X Windows unix workstations, and you had to input all the co-ordinates and shapes one by one numerically. Then you pressed draw, and it slowly drew a 3D projection line by line on the screen, in a similar way to the screensaver, if much more primitive. The slowness didn't matter because it was quite hypnotic to watch, which I'm guessing the screensaver developers might have noticed too. The results did look a lot better when printed using an X-Y plotter (which was even more fun to watch).
I am going to age myself here, but I think it's worth it.
The first PC I remember seeing, let alone playing with, was some big RM thing in the classroom of reception class when I was 5. It ran Windows 3.1, and on it was some sort of application that you would paint with. You could just circles, squares, or stars, and you'd click and drag the mouse and it'd paint it. Right at the top of the screen was a button, and when you clicked it the whole thing you just painted started flashing. It did nothing for those with epilepsy.
That was the coolest thing I ever saw a computer do until the school got hold of some Windows 95 machines, and this screensaver appeared (along with the maze). That blew my tiny 8 year old mind at the time.
Honestly, even now, I think the pipes screensaver is a work of art. I don't care that my mobile phone can pay for stuff and take photos. Pipes is where the PC peaked.
> That was the coolest thing I ever saw a computer do until [3D Pipes]
It sounds like demos and the demoscene may have passed you by! :)
(Coders showing off their skills by packing an audio visual demo into an arbitrarily small file such as 64k, or on a computer with limited RAM such as a Commodore 64 or Atari ST. I came across then sideways, because the Amiga demoscene spawned Tracker audio files - sequenced audio files embedded with samples - which people later used to show off the Gravis Ultrasound board on PCs)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demoscene
I for one was very found of a small program you could manually launch in Windows (95?), called "e-sheep" if I remember well.
It would at random time pop on top of your actual desktop sheep falling from the sky (either in plain jump mode or sometimes in flying saucer of some sort), which then would wander on your screen, graze, scratch themselves, fall asleep, mate with others, fight, fall in love and so on.
Part of my appreciation was perhaps due to the fact that it seemed to connect with the characters in the french comic-strip "Le génie des alpages", from the late and much missed F'murr.
It might have been a screen saver... There were screen savers that would animate creatures and other effects over your desktop and workspace, done in such a way that over a period of time of maybe ten minutes every pixel would be changed, therefore fulfilling the purported purpose of 'saving' your CRT.
"Less sheep, more cat. It ran after the mouse cursor, curled up on top of windows to fall asleep."
WOW - I actually remember that - it was great to see it running after the cursor. And once it caught up, if the cursor stayed stationary for too long, the cat curled up and went to sleep.
I also recall it would sit up and using its rear leg, it would scratch itself behind the ear, and also run around in a circle as if to catch a fly !
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