[ahmedfromtunis]

Oh, so that's why! Until now, I believed they were used to reduce energy consumption when the screen wasn't used. That's why I believed they were just some gimmicky, useless piece of software.

A bit off topic, but I also miss the screen obliterating hammer we used to play with as kids. Any modern, web rendition of that piece of stress-reliever?

[fredley]

You mean this? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLYatZdABrs

[ahmedfromtunis]

Yes, that's the one. I totally forgot that there were other options too.

It's sad that such cultural artifacts are more ephemeral than a mesopotamian clay tablet. Humans four thousand years from now may wonder what happened that made us culturally unproductive, unaware that almost everything we made didn't even exist.

[galdosdi]

This reminds me of recently learning more about ancient Rome. Since most stuff except for some monuments was built with wood, it's all gone now.

Most people lived in 3 or 4 IIRC story rowhouses. The richest were at the bottom nearest the latrine, and had their own kitchen and servants to work the kitchen. The middle class were in the middle, with some kitchen facilities they operated themselves. The poorest were at the top with no way to cook and relied on street carts.

I was kinda shocked to read this description and how similar it was to a modern city. But since all that is wood, it's all gone. We only know even this because Rome was such a powerful and rich culture that there was a lot of writing, and a comparatively lot got saved for centuries. (Although the vast majority has still been lost, just from estimating based on works cited by ancient works that we don't have copies of)

Writing wasn't cheap, and preserving and transmitting writing isn't cheap. Writing about obvious everyday stuff everyone knows in such an environment has a much smaller chance of making it through the many historical hoops it needed to make its way to us.

Many other more prehistorical places could well have had significant buildup that we would recognize as modern in all but industrialization, but except when someone went to the trouble to build with stone instead of the more common random natural materials like wood.... all gone.

Who knows what went on that we just will never know about because it didn't get written down enough or the culture that wrote it wasn't powerful enough or long lived enough to preserve enough of those writings?

(IANA historian and might be a bit or a lot off. Biggest sources are "Rome: A history in seven sackings" and "Against the grain" Not trying to make strong claims here, just a general sense of wonder at how big the gap between what we assume about the past and what actually was could be. As a layman just dipping my toe into learning more about early history / prehistory, it's shocking and fascinating)

[fredley]

The same goes for mesopotamia. We know a bit from the clay tablets, but we don't know anything about the ephemoral memes of the time.

[moftz]

Occasionally we find clay tablets like the one where the guy is bitching about quality of copper ingots he was supposed to buy for his boss. It's kind of a fun look into normal, everyday life that almost never made it past the recycle bin of history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complaint_tablet_to_Ea-nasir

[xjwm]

It looks like the program you are talking about, "Desktop Games," is still hosted on: http://www.gemtree.com/program.htm. No idea if it works on modern Windows or not.