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The default display colors for software have gone from green text on black background to black text on white background, and then back again in the 40 years tha
by nikanj 6y ago
The default display colors for software have gone from green text on black background to black text on white background, and then back again in the 40 years that emacs has been on the scene.
It’s quite silly to think that dark mode is a modern invention. It’s just a example of how software trends are a form of fashion, and they do behave cyclically.
See also: return to lightweight clients and fat servers as we moved onto the web, and then moving the bulk of work back to fat clients with React etc
- umanwizard 6y agoGreen on black was not exactly a “software default”. It was a physical property of the display hardware. Dark on light is at least thousands of years old, think of ink on papyrus in ancient Egypt.
- nikanj 6y agoI think we're talking about different things here. You're talking about the physical restrictions of the media, I'm talking about the defaults selected by software developers. My first computer could display dozens of colors, but defaulted to a dark background and light text. Windows 3.11 defaulted to black-on-white, on hardware from the same era. And now we're cycling back to defaulting to dark modes again.
- umanwizard 6y agoYou’re right; I was thinking of the text-only terminals that were widely used in the 70s and 80s. I believe those are where the green/amber/white on black aesthetic originated, because they couldn’t display anything else. But I could be wrong.