Screensavers
They weren't supposed to exist — they were meant to prevent screen burn. Instead, screensavers became entertainment, the reason you stopped moving your mouse on purpose and just watched.
Berkeley Systems released After Dark for the Macintosh in 1989 and brought it to Windows in 1991, and its flying toasters became the icon of the whole genre: 1940s-style chrome toasters with bird wings, flapping across a black screen with slices of toast in tow. The toasters were one of the main reasons After Dark got popular — iconic enough that Berkeley sold flying-toaster merchandise, including T-shirts, and iconic enough that Jefferson Airplane sued in 1994, claiming the design copied their 1973 album cover art. The case was dismissed because the art had never been registered as a trademark, but the lawsuit itself was a kind of compliment: the toasters had landed in the culture hard enough to look like theft.
On Windows, the screensaver that mattered was 3D Maze, an OpenGL screensaver present in Windows from Windows 95 until Windows ME. Every time the screen blanked, the computer generated a random brick-walled maze and then walked it in first person, solving it by the right-hand rule. You couldn't steer it — you just watched it work the corridors, waiting to see the exit. For office workers in beige cubicles, screensavers were the aquarium of the '90s: a window into something moving, something alive on the monitor while nobody was touching the machine. For a decade, "waiting for the screen to lock" was entertainment.
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