> That's why it ended up being in one of the palettes for the primitive-by-today's-standards CGA adapter in the early IBM PC's. Interesting... do you have a s

> That's why it ended up being in one of the palettes for the primitive-by-today's-standards CGA adapter in the early IBM PC's. Interesting... do you have a source for that? The hideous CGA palette is legendary, but I thought the reason for its ugly palette is a consequence of: (1) only having 16KB of video RAM, and (2) only having ~10 bits of mode-setting and colour control registers. The CGA card was built entirely from off-the-shelf discrete logic chips (plus a 6845 CRTC) and there simply wasn't room to add any extra registers. At 320x200 resolution the colour depth was limited to 2bpp, and these two bits are wired up directly to the red and green bits of the display output. The blue and intensity bits are (in graphics modes) wired up to the mode control register. Thus the four hideous palettes: the B and I bits have to be set to a fixed value for the entire screen, and only the R and G bits can vary on a pixel-by-pixel basis. (There's a bonus palette of red, cyan, and white that can be enabled by yet another mode control bit; and the background colour -- which is usually black -- can actually be set to any one of the 16 available colours.)