CD-Rom - ''Jurassic Park: The Screen Saver''

"Jurassic Park: The Screen Saver" Asymetrix (800) 448-6543 Windows $34.95, $24.95 for upgrade from disk version

Back in the Stone Age of Computers, about five or six years ago, my biggest concern was phosphor burn-in on my monitor. But shareware bulletin boards were full of little screen-saver utilities that would either blank a monitor or run random patterns - all guaranteed to prevent dreaded burn-in of characters left on the screen.

As color monitors and Windows became more prevalent, brilliant programmers gave us flying toasters to prevent burn-in. Never mind that the new monitors were pretty much impervious to burn-in. The entertainment factor overrode any practical use screen savers once had.

My first hard disk had a whopping 21 megabytes of space, so when I report that the floppy disk version of "Jurassic Park - the Screen Saver" takes up about 60 megabytes of hard disk space, I have to sit back for a moment and reflect on how far we've come in so short a time.

You'd be foolish, though, to take up that kind of real estate when you can get this, the ultimate screen saver, on CD-ROM. And what fun it is. You can play scenes from the movie, attach dinosaur sounds to events in Windows (replace the "ta-da" when Windows launches with a hearty dinosaur roar), replace your wallpaper with scenes of pterodactyls, listen to characters from the movie, and when you're away from your work station, let scenes from the movie play out. You get everything but the popcorn.