Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mailrus!uwm.edu!uwvax!titanic.cs.wisc.edu!tonyrich
From: tonyrich@titanic.cs.wisc.edu (Anthony Rich)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.misc
Subject: Re: The next screen saver feature?
Message-ID: <11276@spool.cs.wisc.edu>
Date: 16 Sep 90 19:43:20 GMT
References: <13599@hydra.gatech.EDU>
Sender: news@spool.cs.wisc.edu
Organization: U of Wisconsin CS Dept
Lines: 45

William Moss writes:

>What will be the next features in the heavily escalating war of features
>between After Dark and Pyro?

I'm hoping the next feature will be added by Apple:  Screen-blanking
protection in hardware.  Last spring I argued that hardware should protect
hardware.  A local power flicker and a flaky keyboard here at the U of WI
have convinced me.

A momentary power outage this summer caused all the workstations in the
CS department here to go down and automatically reboot.  An officemate's
machine got hung midway during its reboot sequence for some obscure reason,
after displaying about 20 lines of boot messages.  Since his machine was
hung, the usual software screen saver wasn't up and running.

The flicker happened on a Saturday.  By the time he came in Monday and
discovered the problem, the boot messages were burned into the 19" monitor.

The corresponding problem on a Mac would be to have an INIT hang during
an unattended (perhaps remote) reboot; the "Welcome to Macintosh" message
and the already-displayed INIT icons would burn into the screen.
I don't know if that has ever happened on a Mac yet, but if it hasn't, it's
just a matter of time.

Recently on another officemate's workstation, the keyboard went flaky and
spontaneously began generating a stream of slash characters, even though
nobody was using it!  The screen showed "Login:  ///////////////////".
The display wasn't changing, but the software screen saver didn't kick in,
apparently because the keyboard was still active (generating slashes).  I
came in that evening and noticed that the screen wasn't blanked, so I
turned the brightness down to zero manually.  Sheesh.

I think the lack of screen activity (*just* the screen!) should be detected
by hardware, which could generate a "screen needs blanking" event.  If
no software screen-saver responds to that event, a simple hardware screen
blackout should be triggered.  Lots of those old 80x25 character-based
terminals did hardware screen-blanking; I'm sure the Mac could, too.

  -- Tony
--
-----------------------------------------
| EMAIL:  tonyrich@titanic.cs.wisc.edu  | 
| Disclaimer:  I speak only for myself. |
-----------------------------------------