I knew this was introduced by NCSA Mosaic. I remember it well. It was actually a very good browser. Not as many features as Netscape but it was very fast. Nets

I knew this was introduced by NCSA Mosaic. I remember it well. It was actually a very good browser. Not as many features as Netscape but it was very fast. Netscape added too many fluff features like backgrounds and moving GIFs which were abused way too much (see any "1990s retro web site" for what I mean), so I often opted to using Mosaic even after Netscape became mainstream. It makes sense too, black doesn't stand out enough from unlinked text. And can be confused with regular non-link underlining. It could have been any colour but it's a good convention. After all we could also have used green for stop and red for go (like in the first episode of "Sliders" :) ), but at least everyone around the world uses the same.