Relive the 90s With You Don't Know Jack-Era Technology

Berkeley Systems was a software company that played its part in a significant stretch of computer technology's formative years before the turn of the millennium. While perhaps the most widely known fixture of its legacy is the You Don't Know Jack video game franchise, it was famous in the early 1990s for selling a screensaver program distributed on CD-ROMs. Named After Dark, it employed animated pixel-based art to prevent screen burn-in with humorous imagery such as flying toasters with wings. Given the vastly different and more rudimentary programming languages available in the early 90s, this approach to expressing screensavers was technically impressive and seen as a creative way to apply an emerging technical platform and art form.

Of course, as of three decades later, recreating these sequences is many orders of magnitude easier and can be executed using nothing more than specific functions of standardized web design programs. The CSS style sheet language, which had primarily been used to apply static styling to equally static web pages in the 2000s, has expanded its functionality and is now capable of producing animated effects that do not necessarily require JavaScript processes working in unison. A web page located at bryanbraun.com/after-dark-css/ accurately recreates the original Berkeley Systems screensavers by using modernized web syntax while avoiding self-contained files exported from animation programs.

Viewing the page source files shows that many of these recreations are executed with syntax that would be quite easy for a student in HTML and CSS to visually parse. Specific images, such as an image of a spinning globe and the aforementioned flying toasters, are stored and called as animated .gif files. Other effects, such as the "Rainstorm" and "Warp" screens, are manually recreated through pure syntax manipulation and rely on the user's browser to execute them. The screensavers depicted on the site hail from an era of computer technology in which Macintosh and Microsoft Windows operating systems were still running on DOS. In commemoration of this, both the website's user interface and the background images of certain screen savers resemble these archaic operating systems. For more information click here https://www.bryanbraun.com/after-dark-css/.