Berkeley Systems

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

~ the goodbye ~

berkeley systems was a san francisco bay area software company founded in 1987 by wes boyd and joan blades. the early contracts were accessibility software for the macintosh, written for the national institutes of health to help partially-sighted users navigate the os. the screensaver came after, almost as a side project, and changed what was on the screen of every mac in the office for the next decade.

after dark shipped in 1989 for macintosh, then in 1991 for windows. it was the first modular screensaver. you installed it and picked a module. the os kicked it in when the machine had been idle long enough. the famous module was flying toasters: chrome 1940s-style toasters with wings, drifting across the black screen carrying pieces of toast. jack eastman and patrick beard brought the toaster idea in. other modules drew fish swimming and a lawnmower man cutting black grass into stripes.

by 1994 berkeley systems had grown to about 120 employees with 30 million dollars in annual revenue. it pivoted into trivia games too. you don't know jack shipped in 1995 and became a cultural object of its own. cuc international's sierra on-line division acquired berkeley systems in 1997 for 13.8 million dollars. the original after dark team had already started leaving by then. wes boyd and joan blades went on to co-found moveon.org the following year.

by the time i was online on dial-up in 1998, after dark was already a winamp-era nostalgia object. crt monitors had moved to the standby blank-screen approach by the late 90s, and lcd panels were starting to ship. screen burn-in was already a less urgent problem. the toasters belonged to an earlier room. i saw them later in screenshots and emulator videos, never on a real beige mac in front of me.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what was inside ~

the modular architecture was the clever part. after dark shipped with an sdk so other developers could write their own modules. there was an entire ecosystem of third-party module collections. the simpsons after dark and looney tunes after dark were both real product skus. licensed modules were a real revenue line for a while.

the screensaver did not actually save anything by the late 90s. lcd displays did not have the phosphor burn-in problem that crt screens had. running an animated background just used more power and cpu. by windows 98 and mac os 8.5 the os had its own built-in blanker. the standalone product became decorative.

~ what got buried with it ~

sierra on-line was itself in trouble. cuc international had just merged with hfs to form cendant, and cendant accounting fraud was uncovered in 1998. sierra was sold to havas in 1999, infogrames bought havas in 2001, and the after dark brand kept trading hands while the team dispersed. a final shareware-style after dark release came out in 2006 with no real connection to the original work.

~ the inheritance ~

the flying toasters are still a logo on retro tech t-shirts. you can find a web-based after dark module preserved on the internet archive, and modern macos has a screensaver mode called flying toasters that some maintainers ported as homage. the bigger inheritance is the founders. wes boyd and joan blades took their berkeley systems money and started moveon.org in 1998 as a one-petition site protesting clinton's impeachment. moveon outlived the company that paid for it.

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