It's almost twenty years ago now that I installed a Linux for the first time. It was the green gecko one, and it arrived in a large box straight from my uncle's office. At least a year had gone by before I was able to connect to the internet. I don't even remember what the problem was; maybe a very specific set of AT commands that needed to be sent to my ISDN modem, I don't know. No soundtrack to this story, by the way - I couldn't get audio to work either. So, what do you do with a Linux computer without internet and sound? You browse the CDs, of course! And these CDs, seven of them if memory serves me right, were packed with software and games of all kinds. One day I would pretend to know how an electric circuit worked, and the other day I was composing music. Then one day I stumbled upon XScreenSaver.

Wow. So, if you've never seen screensavers on Linux and are thinking Windows walls, pipes, or that spinning one where you can get a list of volcanos - you're in for a treat. Most of them done by a single hacker, Jamie Zawinski, they are little pieces of contemporary art that you can just stare at for minutes at a time. And that's what I did. I stared at bouncing cows, at moire patterns, at molecules! and ants marching around moebius strips. And now I'm trying to remember, when was the last time I saw a screensaver? In a supermarket maybe? Even that I can't remember. No one seems to be using screensavers any more.

It's interesting that the fall of the screensaver came with mass screen addiction we all share. Before, you could find me reading, or listening to music, or daydreaming or just being bored; crucially, completely away from the computer screen. (And you couldn't carry the screen with you, of course. It was a CRT.) So every time I got back in front of the keyboard, I saw a screensaver. And because I wasn't busy, I could wait for a bit and see what it does. That specific feeling of letting myself to be mesmerized is what I miss now. Because we're all so busy. We never lock the screen, and if we do, we make it go pitch black and corporate, and we save the battery that way. But where's fun in that?