I think it is even better than that, screen savers were a hack that existed in the interstitial time between CRTs and LCDs because technology would not move fast enough.

The first CRTs were actually used as memory[1] and the fact that the phosphor 'remembered' what it had shown was an engineered thing. Then CRTs were used as displays that you could 'burn in' the contents was a problem [2].

That started the notion of not keeping the same thing on the screen all of the time which was "hard" to do for character driven terminal screens, but possible with bitmap driven screens. The first 'screen saver' I saw was at PARC on an Alto of all things which was drawing lissajous figures during idle time. They also appeared in arcades where screen burn was an issue so the game would display something else to avoid screen burn.

And THEN the energy crisis hit and everyone was looking at saving energy so CRT manufacturers added a simple circuit that if you disabled vertical sync they would detect that and actually turn off the electron beam completely. (horizontal sync was still needed to maintain the high voltage field at the front of the CRT). But by now a lot of people had grown attached to screen savers so turning off the screen was avoided.

And then we got to LCDs where running a screen saver was actively bad for the screen since there was no way to turn off the LCD backlight which was the weak point of the LCD screen and running a screen saver put more hours on that resulting in a faster death of your LCD.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Williams_tube

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screen_burn-in

And now we live in a time when I regularly hear people refer to their desktop wallpaper as their "screen saver" at work. I'm occasionally tempted to point out that a static wallpaper is the complete opposite of a screen saver, but then I remember that nobody likes a pedant (even an accurate one).

> I remember that nobody likes a pedant (even an accurate one).

It's just that nobody likes being corrected. Try correcting someone's spelling or grammar on any Internet forum (including HN), and you'll be hit with a barrage of "you know what I meant" and "language changes" retorts.

> > I remember that nobody likes a pedant (even an accurate one).

> It's just that nobody likes being corrected.

Nice one.

I remember lots of people doing that at least as far back as when Windows 3.x was common.

That wasn't really the purpose of the article, though. It was an interview with the creator of an iconic piece of software from a time that ushered in widespread use of personal computers. Should historians not write about the Battle of Gettysburg because it should never have been fought in the first place?

I felt the author saw that the software hadn't been properly stewarded by the various software houses that inherited it. However, I felt that it was a novelty product in the first place plus the then 'evil' Microsoft took away their Mac market by dominating the marketplace with Windows and then building a fairly reasonable screen saver into the operating system.

This is a bit like studying a battle and not mentioning the enemy or the terrain, blaming the marketing department of Lockheed Martin for it going wrong.

> Really this product should never have existed and we should have moved to modern power management of monitors 30 years ago. Think of the electricity that could have been saved.

But then we would've had to store it in Leyden Jars.. millions and millions of Leyden Jars.