Re:Aggressively Stupid: The Story Behind After Dark (2007)
by salgernon on Tuesday August 01, 2017 @02:54PM
(#14904079)
I worked at Berkeley Systems from 1991 to 1994ish. I wasn't originally hired to work on screen savers, but as side projects failed, we all ended up doing so. (I got the job in part because I'd worked with Patrick Naughton at Sun on xlock at Sun.)
I ended up writing the After Dark 3.0 engine for Mac, which was a lot of fun because I wrote it as an application and then figured out how to make it run within the context of the frontmost application without affecting it. It only patched 5 system traps rather than the 20+ traps the previous engine patched.
We were in constant competition with an Apple Engineer named Tom Dowdy that had a freeware product "Dark Side of the Mac" that patched no traps at all - patching was always blamed for system instability.
It seems like so much work went into something really small... I remember countless overnights, costo runs, alcohol, and a dead hamster named Trurl.
I ended up writing the After Dark 3.0 engine for Mac, which was a lot of fun because I wrote it as an application and then figured out how to make it run within the context of the frontmost application without affecting it. It only patched 5 system traps rather than the 20+ traps the previous engine patched.
We were in constant competition with an Apple Engineer named Tom Dowdy that had a freeware product "Dark Side of the Mac" that patched no traps at all - patching was always blamed for system instability.
It seems like so much work went into something really small... I remember countless overnights, costo runs, alcohol, and a dead hamster named Trurl.