Fish Screensavers

Fish screensavers. Today this is computer word (and program) that everyone, from a five-year-old kindergarten student, to a sixty-five year old grandmother knows. In fact, ask just about anyone and most people will tell you that a fish screensaver is something that is installed on computers to personalize and provide entertainment on the monitor with everything from family photos to geometric designs and art. Some people even have 3D designs and swimming fish screensavers installed. Corporate computers often have company fish screensavers installed to maintain cohesiveness, to guarantee no workplace inappropriate images are used and even to provide password protection (by requiring a password to login, once the fish screensaver is used). Sometimes company computers even install fish screensavers as a means of distributing information or data, often in the form of static facts that recycle continually, or as real time data, such as a stock ticker pulled from a website.

Of course, as entertaining as it is to have swimming fish screensavers installed, all these current uses weren’t the original purpose of fish screensavers. Originally, fish screensavers were designed to do exactly what their name says save screens from burning out. It all goes back to when computer monitors were first designed, using cathode ray tubes, or CRT’s, much like early television sets. The inside of the monitor was coated with a phosphor compound lit up when hit with high-speed electrons. Unfortunately, after a period of time, the phosphor coating would lose the ability to light up, and something termed burn in would happen, leaving areas of the monitor permanently damaged. The whole point of early fish screensavers was to minimize the damage caused to the monitor, and prolong its usefulness. Software developers came up with simple programs that turned the monitor black after a period of inactivity, which minimized burn in damage by using a fish screensaver.

All that changed in 1989, when Bill Stewart and Ian MacDonald of Software Dynamics designed a relatively simple 16-bit program they called the Magic Screensaver. This is the program that started the whole fish screensaver craze. It wasn’t long before the Magic Screensaver was licensed to hundreds of thousands of users, solely through word of mouth, including major corporations such as Hewlett Packard, Exxon, and even Microsoft. Twenty years later, the original fish screensaver can still be downloaded through Dynamic Karma.

The popularity of this first fish screensaver propelled other software developers to design even more amusing and entertaining images, including moving images (think swimming fish screensavers) and even 3D images. ChromaZone, developed in the mid 1990’s by Steve Gibson was one of the first 3D animated programs, remarkable for its 132 KB size. Another notable early fish screensaver was Glacier Point Software’s program called Night Bird, which featured a flying bird, a dynamic 3D background and was only 334 KB in size. It was this program that may have been the inspiration for so many current fish screensavers, including the ever popular fish screensaver.

Correspondent with the rise in popularity of computers, by the late 1990’s almost every household, business and even students had computer systems, so too raise the popularity of fish screensaver development. Software developers continued to ply ingenuity and creativity into increasingly complex fish screensaver designs, including, of course, flying birds, random phrases, geometric designs, images of famous landmarks and the ubiquitous swimming fish screensavers.

Today, CRT technology is outdated, and television and computer monitors no longer face burn in problems, but the popularity of fish screensavers as a means of entertainment, personalization and security remain. There are any number of websites offering paid and even free downloads of literally thousands of different fish screensaver programs. While different images rise and fall in popularity, swimming fish screensavers continue to amuse and mesmerize thousands of computer users.