Show HN: ANSI-Saver – A macOS Screensaver

In the BBS days persistent storage was expensive. Backups were at best saving something to two different floppy disks. If you got lucky you could rebuild most stuff from files you had shared with friends.

It was a weird time frame. My partner was living in the house, and I was moving to Seattle. The backup was pretty much inches from the system itself. Not the last time I learned that lesson. But, the original SCSI drive did survive, even if the machines and desk and couches, etc. were all ruined. With HTML coming along we didn't rebuild. It's still seems like such a huge loss not having entities like BBSs on the internet. Just like the loss of IRC and other basic systems / plumbing of the capital I Internet. Yeah, they needed upgrades, but that's what IETF, RFC, and scrappy hackers are for. <sigh> Loving on the ANSI!

ah, good catch.

Fixed!

You might find some volunteers here willing to make Intel builds :)

Pretty much any Mac bought in the past 5 years can fulfil the requirements, which doesn't feel terribly unreasonable, and I bet the Intel case would be straightforward to cover too, and now you're catering for every Mac bought in the past 6 years.

Apple are dicks about making it easy to test on older macOS revisions, but I'm sure that'd actually be easier than you'd expect too. (I have a FOSS project that has macOS as a supported target. It targets OS X Mavericks, released in 2013. I don't have any easy way of testing anything older than macOS Ventura, released in 2022, and to be honest I don't really care to figure out how to do any better, but, last time somebody complained about OS X Mavericks incompatibility, and I fixed the problem, which was actually very easy to do: it did apparently work.) Put in a modicum of effort and I'm sure you can make this thing work for every Mac sold since like 2015, and there'd be a non-zero chance it'd work for some older ones too.

Thinking back to when BBSs were a thing, since that'd be on topic: perhaps Americans got a lucky break with the Apple II, in production from 1977-1993 (says Wikipedia) and seemingly a viable commercial platform for a measurable fraction of the period? For me, growing up in the UK in the late 20th century, the whole computer ecosystem seemed to get pretty much completely refreshed about every 10 years at the very most. Buy a BBC Micro in 1983: platform dead by 1990. Buy a ZX Spectrum in 1983: platform dead by 1991. Buy an Atari ST in 1985: platform dead by 1992. Buy an Amiga in 1986: platform dead by 1994. The PC was a bit of an exception, as the OS remained the same (for good or for ill...) for longer, but the onward march of hardware progress meant that you'd need new hardware every few years if you wanted to actually run recent software.

Anyway, my basic thinking is that if in March 2026 you are releasing some software that requires you to have a computer manufactured at some point in the 2020s, then this is hardly without historical precedent. It might even simply be the natural order of things.

Me? I set the displays to go to sleep after N minutes.