A design flaw in the Windows 3D Pipes screen saver pointed out by a customer

[willvarfar]

I just knew before I clicked that this would be a Raymond Chen article :)

Raymond is the old-school engineering end of Microsoft. He was used to represent the old school in a seminal blog post by Joel Spolsky https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2004/06/13/how-microsoft-lost...

When finding that link I saw it was 20 years old! 20 years ago Raymond was the 'old school' celebrity programmer at Microsoft. And Raymond is still blogging now 20 years later :)

[guidorice]

> Instead, use the black screen screen saver on your server. It uses no CPU.

It also doesn't have all the memory leaks as the 3d pipes screen saver.

[firtoz]

Even better: defrag for a screen saver: https://youtu.be/kPv1gQ5Rs8A?t=27

[avidphantasm]

My primary memory of this screensaver was while working as a desktop support work-study in college. Our NT 4 servers (PDC and its backup) ran the 3D pipe screen saver. I pointed out to the admin that it was using a software OpenGL renderer and so likely wasting CPU cycles. They then switched to the Star Field or maybe the blank screensaver (can’t remember now).

[rini17]

It affected early CD burners too. Which did not have large buffers nor underrun protection. They would write garbage when data stream was interrupted because any other software used system resources. Win95 was not exactly known to manage them smoothly.

[Caius-Cosades]

I wish they had kept the 3D pipe screensaver. It servers absolutely no purpose whatsoever, it's objectively a complete and utter waste of time and development resources to include it, but I still miss it.

[neverartful]

I believe that from Microsoft's perspective, it most certainly had a purpose. The purpose was marketing/advertising the OpenGL/3D capabilities of NT.

[johnea]

Xscreensaver still has a 3D pipes.

Just stop running that archaic corporate OS...

[roselan]

On my very first job at the turn of the century, I remember I was by a client seating in front of a server, looking at a black screen waiting for something to happen, highly doubting the claim of the client.

"It only works when you guys are here". Yeah, right.

Already 3 coworkers had to deal with this but couldn't find anything, this was more than strange. So I asked them to yell as soon as something happen.

15 minutes later my wandering thoughts were interrupted by Pipes materializing itself into existence. Oh. And for that day I was the hero.

[veltas]

A number of these old 3D screensavers are identical to examples in the old OpenGL red book, the version that's now available for free online.

I wonder if they were just copied from the book?

[mcraiha]

Maybe it is time for decompilation effort?