How the best Windows screensaver came to be

Are screensavers art? If they are, one of the most iconic Windows screensavers, 3D Pipes, only existed because of an internal Windows contest to show off OpenGL support to Windows NT.

Raymond Chen, a longtime software developer at Microsoft, chronicles the internal stories of Microsoft from his blog, The Old New Thing. Chen’s blogs and interviews have covered “the USB Cart of Death,” the reason behind the codename of 64-bit Windows (Sundown), the confidential coffee maker, and the ASCII cats hidden in Windows 8. Chen’s blogs read like stories you’d recount to coworkers a decade later.

Chen’s latest tale recounts how 3D Pipes, the classic screensaver came to be: Microsoft wanted to show off OpenGL within Windows NT 3.5, but wanted a way to do it that wasn’t an ad. (This was at the time when Microsoft developed apps like Solitaire to show off clicking, click-and-drag, and other interactions in a playful manner).

So Microsoft held an internal contest, which was to deliver your best screensaver to be added to Windows NT. As Chen tells it, the OpenGL team delivered all sorts of candidates: 3D Text, 3D Flying Objects, 3D Pipes — you get the idea. A senior executive loved them so much that they were all added.

As Chen and Gizmodo note, there is a way to bring back the nostalgia: run 3D Pipes right from your browser.