AfterDarkofSmirnov.Cpt.Binhex

AfterDarkofSmirnov.Cpt.Binhex is a third-party module for Berkeley Systems' After Dark screensaver for the classic Mac OS, themed as a parody on Smirnov vodka iconography. It ships as a Compact Pro archive (.cpt) wrapped in BinHex 4.0 (.hqx) for posting to Info-Mac, part of the early-1990s explosion of fan-built After Dark modules.

What an After Dark Module Is

After Dark, released by Berkeley Systems in 1989, made its name with the Flying Toasters and an open architecture that let third-party developers ship drop-in animation modules. Hundreds of community-authored modules circulated on bulletin boards and Info-Mac, ranging from polished commercial homages to one-off jokes and parodies like this one.

The Smirnov Parody Theme

The module riffs on the Smirnoff/Smirnov vodka brand, a common 1990s pop-culture reference, in the same spirit as the era's many parody screensavers (Death Toasters, Star Trek and Simpsons mods, and other unauthorized brand plays). As a fan module it was never an official Berkeley Systems or Smirnov product.

Distribution Format

The .Cpt.Binhex chain is classic Mac archive plumbing: Compact Pro (Bill Goodman) preserved the Mac resource fork and bundled multiple files; BinHex 4.0 then encoded the archive into ASCII so it could survive email and FTP transfer. To install, users had to BinHex-decode and then expand the .cpt before dropping the module into the After Dark Files folder in their System Folder.

Installation Notes

The module requires a working installation of After Dark 2.0 or later on a 68k or PowerPC Macintosh. Color or grayscale display is typical for visual modules of this era; performance varied with CPU speed and the number of simultaneous animations.