3D Pipes Screensaver

Oh the 3d pipes screensaver. When I was 15, in high school, we had to spent 1 week every year in apprenticeship in some field-related company. Me and two other classmate went to one small telecommunication firm. On the first day boss called us to the conference room and told us to sit down. I sat on the nearest chair, the boss leaned to me and whispered to my ear "that's my chair!". Then he gave us notebook with 10 minute ISDN presentation and left. He said he will be back after 8 hours. We watched it 2-3 times, then out of boredom we were checking new screensavers in brand new windows and we spent good two hours watching the pipes screensaver. We forget to turn it back, when boss returned, the notebook wake up from sleep, shortly flashed pipes screensaver and then showed ISDN presentation. "You changed the screensaver? Get the hell out of here!". And fired us. We spent the rest of the week slacking in the town and then made some bullshit made up report about ISDN afterwards. Good times.

I did a fast port of this to webxr

- updated three.js to have xr support - add the vr button to enter xr - change animation callback

https://lets.m4ke.org/pipes/

https://twitter.com/anotherjesse/status/1439681077640052736

No discussion of the 3D screensavers in NT is completely w/o recalling the Customer who called re: their server being slow. The technician we sent to look at it couldn't find any performance indicators amiss when he ran Perfmon on the server's console. The Customer was shocked at how well the server was running while the technician checked it out.

Shortly after he'd left the site the Customer called complaining that the server was "running slow" again. We paged the technician to turn back. He checked it again and still found nothing wrong. It was mysteriously fast again, too. That observation set the wheels in motion for an eventual diagnosis.

Apparently this happened enough that there was KB article published on it: https://www.betaarchive.com/wiki/index.php/Microsoft_KB_Arch...

I tried to leave a BSOD screensaver for my replacement at my old job. I found dozens of candidates but none of them would run in Windows 10. Windows 10 built-in screen savers don't properly work with multiple monitors. I know the demand for screensavers is extremely low, but I was surprised that the OS with the best reputation for legacy support couldn't keep screensaver libraries working.

You can get this with XScreenSaver (works on Mac).

https://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/screenshots/

Look closely at a few screens, there is at least one easter egg in there.

(Edit: removed hint where to find the easter egg.)

I think Dan Flashes took inspiration from some of these screensavers for his shirt designs. The patterns are really quite complex.

If I recall correctly 3D Pipes shipped with NT 3.51 as IIRC 3.5 only shipped with software OpenGL with no support for hardware acceleration.

I remember running it on a DEC Alpha box with an AccelGraphics AG500 and being awed by it.

i can still remember the times when something like a screen saver was actually exciting.

Very nice, it brought memories, although it wasn't my favorite screensaver back then. I found the Serenescreen aquarium to be relaxing (child memories: my father had multiple real tropical fishes aquariums I loved to stare at), and then there was that spectacular screensaver with changing complex high res graphics (for the time, circa 1999) that I can't recall the name, they weren't fractals though. I love the ability to control the camera on this one though. A couple possible improvements: make pipes multicolored by slowly shifting components, and set up pipes so that after some random time a pipe starts shorting from the end at random speed, sort of a reverse-centipede, so eventually it will disappear allowing space for other pipes without the need to continuously refresh the screen.

Nothing is more 90s than huge bulky monitors and screensavers

At first I thought how neat it was to see this classic screensaver rendered in the browser. Then I realized I could fly through it too! Bravo.

This is so, so freakin' cool! Reminds me of the old days when this was my screensaver in old school win95/98 days. Thank you, this made my day!

Was it just me, or was there an easter-egg in the original where occasionally a sphere would be replaced by a tea kettle?