This one and the 3d pipes one were great for boredom while mom used the phone kicking me offline
Brief dev blog talking about the genesis of 3D Pipes and the other iconic 3D Windows screensavers. It’s so short, I’ll post it here to save you the click:
spoiler
Gizmodo calls it “the best screensaver of all time.” They’re referring to the Windows 3D Pipes screensaver, a mesmerizing network of pipes constructed in 3D before your very eyes. How did this iconic screen saver come to be?
One of my old friends told me how he got 3D Pipes added to Windows.
At the time, he was on the Windows OpenGL team. They had successfully implemented the API with hardware acceleration, but had nothing to show it off. Windows NT 3.5 was very close to shipping with OpenGL support, but there was nothing in the product that let the user know that this feature even existed. He had to find a way to advertise the feature without risking product stability.
That’s when it occurred to him to use a screen saver. This provided a point of visibility to the user, and it was relatively low risk, because if there was a problem, they could just tell users, “Sorry, don’t use that screen saver.” (This was in the days before widespread Internet access, and long before it became commonplace for operating systems to auto-update.)
He announced a team-wide screen saver writing contest: Build your best screen saver, and the one that gets the most votes will be added to Windows NT.
The Windows OpenGL team took the contest to heart, and it wasn’t long before they had written 3D Text, 3D Maze, 3D Flying Objects, and, of course, 3D Pipes. He sent email to the entire Windows NT development team with instructions on how to install these new screen savers and where to send in their votes.
By a stroke of luck, one of the people to see these new screen savers was a member of the marketing team who tried them out the night before an already-scheduled visit in New York City with a major computer industry magazine. He loved them and wrote back, “You can call off the vote. We’re adding all of them to the product!”
And with that one piece of email, 3D Pipes and all the other 3D screen savers got added to Windows.
As the Gizmodo article notes, you can now run a reconstruction of the 3D Pipes screen saver right in your Web browser. Enjoy the nostalgia.
That’s actually super wholesome.
Cool kids watched the defrag screen
I got my computer as a hand-me-down from a guy my mom cut hair for and he adamant about making sure I had defragged every time he came over
My dad used to come home from work, kick me off the computer, start the HDD defrag, and leave to go bowling. This was before windows, so I just had a black screen to stare at and watch the % go up 1 by 1 for at least an hour. Sadistic SOB.
Ooooh there’s some nostalgia I forgot I even had! Kid’s these days with their SSDs and their TRIM commands, they don’t know what they’re missing…
In the recommended, there’s a video where someone mic’d up their hard drive so you can hear the satisfying churn of the drive heads. Now that’s the stuff!
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
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Apparently computers defrag in the background on their own these days if needed, which is apparently a lot less due to more modern file systems and storage devices
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AOL might be discontinuing dial-up next month but you can still play the dial-up sound when you want it
A Reddit link was detected in your comment. Here are links to the same location on alternative frontends that protect your privacy.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I think this is a bit? This is an old Windows screensaver
Yeah it’s (probably) a bit
For the young people in the chat here it is
Also a modern WebGL reimplementation (more info here). It’s so odd to see it at such a smooth frame rate after all these years.
holy shit that made me feel dizzy
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
if the inability to find a way out of the prison one has created for oneself is a sign of intelligence, im a goddam genius.
creepy pastaAI is noclipping into the backrooms
I loved this old screensaver; probably what first got me into grid-crawling games
Brings me back to the early 2000’s playing Everquest and getting killed somewhere in Guk and not being to find my corpse in the maze and pulling every monster onto me.
goated screensaver
I’d just like to interject for a moment. What you’re refering to as 3D, is in fact, plane/3D, or as I’ve recently taken to calling it, plane plus 3D. 3D is not an inherent element unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning planar system made useful by the directional perspectives, affine aspects, and isometric projection comprising a full N-dimensional space as defined by math.
this isn’t wolfenstein?
Anything can be Wolfenstein if you’re based enough.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
I donwloaded some spicy videos from the pirate bay and when I woke up the next day my computer said I have to give it $10,000 in bitcoin to get my data back… we are not ready for the singularity…
I saw a similar meme to this about the pipes screensaver, saying the computer was building something. Screensavers are so cool, I wish they were real
My computer is playing some variant of Spore and it’s in a caterpillar stage.
My favorite thing to do with this screensaver was always to use one of two textures, and apply them to the walls, floor, and ceiling:
- A 2 pixel by 2 pixel square with the top left and bottom right set to red (#FF0000) and the other two set to blue (#0000FF)
- A 32x32 pixel square with a series of 45-degree black lines over a white background, with two pixels separating each line, e.g (transparency didn’t work, but you get the idea):
The first one makes this repeating red-and-blue checkerboard that causes instant eyestrain to anyone who happens to look at your screen. The second looks like TV static punctuated by the occasional rat.
