The Purpose of a ScreenSaver

Screensavers have actually been around long before Bill Gates conceived Windows first feasible operating system; even long before Microsoft bought the licensing rights from Apple for the Recycle Bin. As a matter of fact, the processors in my toddlers electronic toys today are more powerful than the what the average desktop computer was when screen savers first came on the scene.

The first screensavers were used on the 1979 Atari 400 and 800 computers to protect their monitors from the last image left on the screen from being burned into the monitors phosphor coating (hence the term, burn-in) permanently. These first screen savers merely performed simple full screen color changes which shifted the display contents periodically thereby not subjecting any one pixel or group of pixels to a steady electric current, which is essentially what alters the properties of the outer phosphor coating. This causation or neglect, depending on who your talking about, triggered the process which became known as, ‘burn-in’. Once burn-in occurred, the damage was permanent; the ghostly image would be forever impregnated onto the screen regardless of what the computer loaded to it there after.

The burn-in problem was thought to be isolated to ‘CRT’s only’ since the giant phosphor coated vacuum tube was susceptible to such maladies. As more and more CRT’s began to get phased out with the advent of the thinner more attractive flat screen LED monitors, everyone was convinced the burn-in malady that once affected their computer monitors would now be a thing of the past. LED’s and plasma screens after all, utilize an entirely different technology to produce an image, so how could they possibly be affected by phosphor burn-in anymore, right? Oddly enough, as more and more consumers bought LED monitors the influx of complaints seem to grow in proportion to the number of consumers who owned them. Many of the Internets computer guru’s were getting swamped with questions and concerns about the infamous ‘burn-in’ problem again, except on their new allegedly impervious LED flat screens…how could this be? The problem was an unpleasant familiar one — ghostly images on computer monitors…hmmm.
It didn’t require an engineer to determine that the LED monitors were experiencing similar phenomenon, but it did require engineers to make the determination that it was not the same problem. It seems that LED’s were just as susceptible to the same monitor abuse that the antiquated CRT’s were. Leaving the monitors on over-night for instance, regardless of make or model, caused what appeared to be, the infamous ‘burn-in’. But was it actually ‘burn-in’? And if it was ‘burn-in’, that meant there was hope for screensavers…this meant that screensavers had a renewed purpose again.