The History of Wallpapers
^{>>>>As told by Wikipedia.org<<<<}

For those of you who have never read it, even Wallpapers are defined by Wikipedia, and have a nice little section on the "History" of our favorite genre. We all know that sometimes Wikipedia is not 100% accurate, but the following is sure to at very least pique your curiosity into further investigating the springs from which our beloved Category have flowed forth.

History

The first use of a distinguishable background in conjunction with overlapping windows was in an experimental office system, Officetalk, developed in 1975 at Xerox PARC on the Alto. Prior to that, the white backgrounds to overlapping windows (for example, in Smalltalk) could be difficult to distinguish from window interiors. The pattern used in Officetalk produced a 25% gray, using dots two pixels high to avoid flicker on the Alto's interlaced screen. The same pattern was adopted for the Xerox Star.

Apple used a similar gray background for their Lisa and Macintosh. However, since these machines had non-interlaced screens it was possible to use a less noticeable background pattern, formed from a simple 2x2 repeating pattern that gave a 50 percent gray. The introduction of color monitors for personal computers led to non-patterned, single-color backgrounds and then to arbitrary 'wallpapers'.

Styles
Wallpaper styles are as varied as people themselves, using photographs, drawings, 3D renders or abstract pattern with complex gradients. It can be useful to have plain areas so that icons can be clearly seen atop the wallpaper.

Typical categories can include cars, models and celebrities, scenery, abstract art, movies, pets, family, symmetry, and personal photos.

In business use, corporate logos or plain backgrounds are often specified by the companies' guidelines.

When using rack mounted computers through a KVM switch, it can often be useful to create a wallpaper with the computer's name on it, to easily identify which computer the user is connected to.

System themes are often distributed with a background image that fits the style of the theme.

Dynamic backgrounds

Some operating environments (e.g. KDE and Mac OS X) allow a number of different wallpapers to be used, and "rotated" to display a different wallpaper at different times, to display a random image from a directory. If the facility is not available in the OS's wallpaper settings, it may be possible to get an external program which can change the wallpaper at certain times. Microsoft Windows 98 and higher allow webpages to be set as frames on the desktop which may be dynamic pages.

Microsoft Windows Vista Ultimate also has the ability to use a video as a wallpaper. Users can choose to use their own home videos which loop continuously, or use one already installed.

Certain media players (mplayer) provide the option to output video to the background of X11, making them suitable as an engine for animated backgrounds from a wide range of video formats.

Programs such as Xplanet and EarthDesk use Internet connections and graphics calculations to change the wallpaper with real data, such as a shadowed view of the earth, the latest cloud or weather map, or various events. Some media players can redirect video playback to desktop, allowing any video to be used as a wallpaper.

Macromedia/Adobe Flash animated movies and games can be set as a dynamic interactive background as well. Point your desktop background settings to an html file with embedded flash movie instead of an image.

Did you know that Wikipedia has featured Wallpapers? Go check them out!
Wikipedia's Featured Desktops
Wikipedia's Featured Widescreen Desktops


See you in the comments,
-AHiL

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