I just knew before I clicked that this would be a Raymond Chen article :)<p>Raymond is the old-school engineering end of Microsoft. He was used to represent the old school in a seminal blog post by Joel Spolsky <a href="https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost-the-api-war/" rel="nofollow">https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...</a><p>When finding that link I saw it was 20 years old! 20 years ago Raymond was the 'old school' celebrity programmer at Microsoft. And Raymond is still blogging now 20 years later :)
> Instead, use the black screen screen saver on your server. It uses no CPU.<p>It also doesn't have all the memory leaks as the 3d pipes screen saver.
My primary memory of this screensaver was while working as a desktop support work-study in college. Our NT 4 servers (PDC and its backup) ran the 3D pipe screen saver. I pointed out to the admin that it was using a software OpenGL renderer and so likely wasting CPU cycles. They then switched to the Star Field or maybe the blank screensaver (can’t remember now).
I wish they had kept the 3D pipe screensaver. It servers absolutely no purpose whatsoever, it's objectively a complete and utter waste of time and development resources to include it, but I still miss it.
On my very first job at the turn of the century, I remember I was by a client seating in front of a server, looking at a black screen waiting for something to happen, highly doubting the claim of the client.<p>"It only works when you guys are here". Yeah, right.<p>Already 3 coworkers had to deal with this but couldn't find anything, this was more than strange. So I asked them to yell as soon as something happen.<p>15 minutes later my wandering thoughts were interrupted by Pipes materializing itself into existence. Oh. And for that day I was the hero.
A number of these old 3D screensavers are identical to examples in the old OpenGL red book, the version that's now available for free online.<p>I wonder if they were just copied from the book?