After Dark

» see berksys.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

after dark sat in the part of personal computing history i can read about but cannot personally remember. the flying toasters era was mac, late 80s through mid-90s, an american office and bedroom thing. i was on a windows pc in turkey at 14.4k by the time it was already nostalgia. the closest version of it that reached me was a windows port of the toasters module that someone passed around in school in the late 90s, by then a retro object rather than a working screensaver. i ran it once and let it loop for an afternoon.

berkeley systems shipped after dark for mac in may 1989, then for windows in 1991. the architecture was the trick. it was the first modular screensaver, so you installed the host program once and dropped in module files for whatever animation you wanted. the os triggered it after a configurable idle window and the module took over the screen until you moved the mouse.

the famous module was flying toasters by jack eastman. chrome 1940s-style toasters with bird wings drifting across the void, carrying pieces of toast. bad dog ran across the desktop on all fours and behaved like a labrador on the floor of an office. dozens of other modules shipped in the official packs plus the licensed expansions, every kind of animated nonsense that fit in a few kilobytes of pixel art.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

the modular sdk was the business. berkeley systems shipped an sdk so third-party developers could write their own modules. that opened the licensing window. the simpsons after dark, star trek after dark, disney after dark, looney tunes after dark, marvel after dark all shipped as official product skus through the mid-90s. each pack was a real revenue line. the screensaver became a tv-merch surface.

the windows version arrived in 1991 with the same module model. windows users got an after dark icon in the control panel and the same flying toasters as the mac people. for a few years there it was the most-recognized piece of pc software that did nothing except play with the idle screen.

~ the unraveling ~

the screensaver category itself was dying. lcd panels do not have phosphor burn-in. crt monitors had moved to the simpler standby-blank approach by the mid-90s. windows 95 shipped with its own built-in blanker that handled flying-windows or the maze module without a separate program. running an animated background just burned cpu and electricity for no benefit.

cuc international's sierra on-line division bought berkeley systems in 1997 for about 13.8 million dollars. the original after dark team had already started leaving. cendant accounting fraud blew up the parent company in 1998. sierra got sold to havas in 1999, infogrames bought havas in 2001. the after dark brand kept trading hands while the team dispersed. by then the toasters were a t-shirt joke.

~ what got buried with it ~

the screensaver as a real category did not survive the move to flat panels and built-in os blankers. what after dark had been was a genre of small-program desktop art, animated by people who treated the idle screen as a canvas. that genre had no business model once the os shipped its own blanker for free. flying toasters live on as a logo and as an open-source homage included in some macos releases. the after dark business itself ended quietly in 1997.

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