The origin story of the Windows 3D Pipes screen saver

That screen saver ate some serious CPU time! My first job was writing software designed to be run by primitive RF handheld devices via a telnet session to a Windows NT Server (running MSSQL). It was a light weight enough application, written in C, doing some database hits, user picks some options etc. More less a directed CRUD app for inventory management.

Well... there were performance problems when the system would get really slow at the factory site. The boss guy over there would always get the reports and go look at the logs from the main machine. He'd always come back and say "Looks fine to me!" and indeed it did - he touched the machine and stopped the screen saver. Boss guy just assumed the floor workers reporting the problem were lazy and didn't want to use the inventory system (he was correct but that wasn't the issue).

One day I was on site and I saw that running pipes everywhere and it hit my young, stupid, naive mind that was our performance problem. I changed it to a blank screen and the problem never repeated.