In the past the computer was used for rare and special operations till World Wide Web brought the new kind of addiction to the developed nations � surfing the web. Back than in late 20th century screensavers were born for a simple reason. It had nothing to do with the computer itself.



Late 80s computer monitors were, regarding the technology, like prehistoric visitors. If you have left your monitor on for a long time, the screen could literally freeze forever. A phenomenon called phosphoric burn would cause the last picture on your screen to burn into the surface of the monitor and stay there forever. Regardless the fact that monitors quickly became a mass production product, there still were no cheap and reliable answers to that issue.

Monitor production companies could not provide any satisfactory breakthrough that would deal with that. An ingenious software solution was born.

That is when first screensavers saw the light of the day. Black background and trivial graphic were the limits of early developers as the hardware and software did not allow anything near to what we can download today.

While windows OS gained tremendously on market share and were subject to substantial investments, majority of worlds PC monitors stayed BW far into 1990s. By the time majority of worlds monitors were in color and phosphorus burn in became a myth from the past, screensavers have already became most downloaded software in the world. Nowadays you can hardly find any computer screen in use that would not be technologically advanced enough to prevent any possibility of a permanent screen freeze.

Modern hardware is so intertwined with the software that each PC screen can be easily adjusted or turned off when you stop working. While early screensavers had a clear mission of protecting a PC monitor, modern screensavers are there to entertain.

Not only has their function changed. If not at least one of basic human emotions are affected, a screen saver is likely to pass into oblivion. One has to be at least shocked, touched, relaxed, entertained or brought to laugh in order to categorize a screensaver as successful. From trivial graphic and programmable fonts to photo slideshows, animations and sound, screensavers seem to evolve in a completely new media.

Internet made it possible to spread the newest animated screensavers in matter of seconds all round the globe. Animated screensavers are for example becoming more and more similar to a movie.

Turning back to a well known fact that each science evolves into several different scientific directions the evolution of screensavers is also likely to branch into at least 5 equally represented categories of screensavers.

Huge amount of screensavers available for free on the web are not watering down the initial heat of creativeness that has to be paid for. Freeware society is taking its toll but screensavers seem to be immune. Typing into a google words for free animated screensavers will produce millions of hits.

Obviously there still is a niche for freeware in this field.

The money for making new screensavers comes from free software providers which attach their software into the package with the downloaded screensaver. Today free animated screensavers are topping the popularity charts, tomorrow free interactive screensavers will probably take their place, but however the product changes, words like free and screensaver will keep dominating all search engines.

There are a lot of new great ideas still to be implemented into screensavers and with each download we make, creators of this great product get a new creative boost to do more.