"Dark mode" is not an innovation. It's a half-assed reversal of a regression. Computers used to show light characters on a dark background. 8-bit platforms oft

"Dark mode" is not an innovation. It's a half-assed reversal of a regression. Computers used to show light characters on a dark background. 8-bit platforms often defaulted to white text on a dark-blue background, which until just a few years ago was still available in Word as a checkbox option. Then the "desktop publishing" craze came along, and brought the analogy of a computer screen to a piece of paper. But this inverse (black text on a white background) scheme ignored the fact that paper doesn't EMIT light. Using these systems was akin to reading the label on the surface of a lit light bulb all day. But for two decades, Windows let you set up a system-wide color scheme whose colors would be inherited by (nearly) all applications. It was great; you could (and I did, in the early '90s) replace the dumb inverse default color scheme with a "charcoal" scheme... essentially exactly what most "dark modes" are today. I think Unix GUIs allowed you to set up color schemes too, leaving only the vaunted Mac GUI as the hard-coded,glaring eyeball-strainer of the era. But now that people are finally realizing that inverse color schemes suck, what did Microsoft do? REMOVE the color-scheme editor from Windows. So now we're being dribbled out "dark mode" one OS, Web page, and application at a time. And it's still hard-coded. That's not innovation. It's pathetic.