Å®ÉúСÊÓƵ

Money cannot buy the present every computer buff will want this Christmas
– a ‘screen saver’ program called Opus ‘n Bill. Legal action taken in California
to prevent the distribution of this program has turned a $40 screen saver
into a collector’s item.

Screen savers are programs that protect the cathode ray tube of a computer
screen. A static image displayed for a long time may ‘burn’ an imprint into
the phosphors of the screen, leaving a permanent mark. Early savers just
blanked out the screen to protect it. Modern savers, however, use moving
images to illuminate all of the phosphor coating randomly.

The Opus ‘n Bill screen saver features the cartoon exploits of a goofy
penguin and a cat – characters who appear in a syndicated newspaper strip
cartoon drawn by Berkeley Breathed. He worked with Delrina, a software company
based in Toronto, to produce the program.

The cartoon also satirises Bill Gates, president of the software company
Microsoft, and the penguin shoots flying toasters out of the sky.

No copies of the original program were sold in Britain. The few copies
left in American shops were snapped up as soon as the news spread that they
were banned.

But New Å®ÉúСÊÓƵ managed to buy a copy, which had been wrongly filed
in a New York shop. The sales assistant said that if he had known it was
on the shelves, he would have bought it himself.

Delrina has had to withdraw the program after a rival software house
claimed Delrina had copied its ideas. Berkeley Systems of California already
offers ‘Flying Toasters’ – domestic toasters, equipped with wings, flying
slowly across the screen – on a program called After Dark, which has become
something of a minor classic.

In the Opus ‘n Bill screen savers, cartoon characters visit President
Clinton and pull down their trousers to display philosophical messages.
In another sequence the cat and the penguin meet a bespectacled billionaire
from a company called ‘Microsquash’. And in the ‘Death Toasters’ sequence,
the penguin uses a shotgun to blast flying toasters out of the sky.

Although the software was packaged with notes ‘to make our lawyers happy’,
saying that Death Toasters is simply a good-natured parody of Flying Toasters,
the Californian company did not see the joke, and sued. In late October
a San Francisco judge ruled that Delrina should stop all sales of the toaster
program.

Delrina says it may play safe and take out the Microsquash sequence
altogether. Bill Gates, the boss of the world’s biggest software company,
might not see the joke either. ‘Microsoft has a lot more money to spend
on lawyers than us,’ says Delrina.

As far as New Å®ÉúСÊÓƵ knows, there is only one copy in this country.
And it is not for sale.