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Three minutes of doing nothing, then everything goes black. In 1983, John Socha wrote the first screensaver software to preserve the image quality of computer displays. Published in Softtalk magazine in 1983 and named SCRNSAVE, the simple program turned the user’s screen to black after three minutes of inactivity (the time could be adjusted only by recompiling the program). Personal computers were becoming affordable and popular, but their high-contrast green phosphor cathode-ray screens were subject to burn-in, where light intensity in one part of the screen left behind a permanent mark. SCRNSAVE was designed to eliminate these ghost-images and preserve the computer’s screen, coining the term and introducing a new software genre along the way.
In his small book from 1964, The Shape of Time, Yale historian George Kubler offers a useful model for constructing a retroactive history of the screensaver. Kubler proposes a realignment of art history based not on chronological procession (with one work following, updating and replacing the previous), but rather multiply-streamed parallel progressions moving through a constellation of distinct formal problems. One work does not necessarily exist at a fixed point in time, but rather connects to one or more form classes that may also have jumbled chronologies. With this rearrangement, Kubler suggests that time moves not forward in a straight line, but intermittently and coincidentally in retreating and recursive loops — “more knot than arrow”. He continues, “The rest of time emerges only in signals relayed to us at this instant by innumerable stages and by unexpected bearers . . . “
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