The screensaver that made screensavers a market
In 1989, Berkeley Systems released After Dark for the Macintosh. It was not the first screensaver — CRT phosphor burn-in was a real problem, and utilities to prevent it had existed for years. What After Dark had that its predecessors didn't was personality: a collection of modules with actual design behind them. Fish swimming across the screen. Warp stars. Bad Dog eating your desktop. Rain Storm. And, most famously, Flying Toasters.
Berkeley Systems was founded in Berkeley, California in 1987 by Wes Boyd and Joan Blades. Its first products were accessibility software — outSPOKEN, a screen reader for blind Macintosh users, and inLARGE, a magnification tool. After Dark was, in that context, the commercial side project that ended up being the thing everyone remembers.
What made it work was treating a utility as a design product. After Dark shipped shrink-wrapped in a box, at a time when most Mac utilities circulated as shareware on disks passed hand to hand. It came with modules you actually wanted to watch, and it let other people write more. That turned a boring technical necessity into something you chose, the way you'd choose a poster.
Flying Toasters, specifically
The Flying Toasters module was designed by Berkeley Systems engineer Jack Eastman — not one of the founders, but the person responsible for the image the company is remembered by. By his account the idea arrived during a late-night programming session, after looking at the toaster in his kitchen.
The module is almost aggressively simple. Chrome toasters with flapping wings drift across a black screen, accompanied by slices of toast. There is no plot. Nothing happens. It ran on machines with a fraction of the graphics capability of a modern watch, and it looked like nothing else on a desk in 1989.
The winged toaster wasn't a brand-new image, either. Jefferson Airplane's 1973 live album Thirty Seconds Over Winterland has flying toasters on its cover. That became a legal problem — though not the one you'd expect.
Two lawsuits, in the wrong order
The first fight had Berkeley Systems on offense. In 1993 the Toronto software company Delrina shipped a Windows screensaver called Opus 'n Bill, built around Berkeley Breathed's Bloom County characters. One module featured Opus the penguin shooting flying toasters out of the sky with a shotgun.
Berkeley Systems sued. A US District judge agreed that Delrina's "Death Toasters" infringed, and Delrina redrew the module — swapping the toasters' wings for propellers. It's an early example of a court treating a piece of software's visual design as an asset worth protecting on its own, separate from the code underneath it.
The second fight came the following year, with Berkeley Systems on defense. In 1994 Jefferson Airplane sued over the Winterland cover art. The case was dismissed on a technicality that is very 1970s: the band had registered the 1973 sound recording, but under the Copyright Office's rules a sound recording registration did not cover the album's cover artwork. The art needed a separate registration and never got one. Berkeley Systems won because nobody had filed a second form twenty-one years earlier.
What happened to Berkeley Systems
The company's biggest commercial hit wasn't the screensaver at all. It was You Don't Know Jack, the trivia game developed by Jellyvision and published by Berkeley Systems from 1995. They also made Stepping Out, a virtual-desktop utility, and licensed screensavers built around Star Trek, The Simpsons and Looney Tunes.
In 1997 Sierra On-Line — by then part of CUC International — acquired the company. After Vivendi's later takeover, what was left of Berkeley Systems got pushed toward web advertising, absorbed into Flipside.com, and folded into a gambling site around 2000. The name stopped meaning anything.
Boyd and Blades left and, in 1998, co-founded MoveOn.org. There's a strange symmetry in two of the most recognizable artifacts of American internet culture — the flying toaster and MoveOn — coming from the same two people.
Why it stuck
Flying Toasters turns up in essentially every "greatest screensavers" retrospective, and it has been rebuilt for modern operating systems more times than anyone has counted. Part of that is the image itself. Most of it is the timing. The toasters were on screen during the handful of years when a personal computer was a thing you decorated, and the screensaver was the one visual choice a normal user made that other people actually saw.
Nobody misses waiting for a screensaver to kick in. What people miss is that the machine on their desk looked like theirs.
Where to find them now
The original modules are archived and playable in a browser at the Internet Archive, and several open-source projects have rebuilt the toasters natively for macOS and Windows.
Or, since you're here: the toasters are on an embroidered dad hat, a desk mat and a fridge magnet — plus the toast on its own, for purists. The full set is in the After Dark collection, and there's more of this era in Screensavers.