The Only Worm You Want in Your Server Room

Screensavers are no longer needed—at least not for their original purpose. They were introduced in the days of CRT displays, when an unchanging image could permanently burn into the screen if it was shown for too long. Permanent burn-in isn’t much of a concern for modern monitors, and it doesn’t even make sense to discuss in the context of an LED matrix.

But while you don’t need a screensaver for your LED matrix, you may want one. Especially if that screensaver happens to perfectly mimic the classic Novell NetWare worm screensaver. Chris Rigby is a network engineer who remembers when these worms were crawling all over the monitors of server rooms around the globe in the 1990s. So Rigby decided to recreate this classic screensaver on the Raspberry Pi Sense HAT, because why not?

The worm screensaver may have decorated the screens of enterprise servers at one time, but this recreation certainly does not need to be enterprise-grade software. So Rigby slapped together some Python code with the help of Claude to make it happen. Each worm gets its own CPU core, and consumes about 2 to 3 percent of a core's capacity on a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B, which may or may not seem like a lot depending on how concerned you are about optimization.

A cool feature of the project is that the worms don’t just wander around aimlessly. As the system load increases, the worms speed up and grow longer. So, technically, this screensaver is also something of a low-resolution resource monitor. Although, you probably should refrain from referring to system load in terms of worm length if you are interested in staying employed.

The source code and installation instructions are freely available on GitHub if you need a little hit of nostalgia to power through the day.