4 ms·

A lot of these colours were probably designed for white backgrounds; the default xterm background colour is white, and many terminals copied that. My old SparcS

A lot of these colours were probably designed for white backgrounds; the default xterm background colour is white, and many terminals copied that. My old SparcStation uses a white background colour from the moment it boots, etc. I'm not sure how common it was in older systems, but it was definitely a thing. In Vim it's been a fixed problem for ages if you use "set background=dark" by the way.

blueflow 4y ago
Having a dark background used to be the default in the beginnings with CRT, colored/bright backgrounds look very ugly when you can see the distinct scanlines.
- estebarb 4y ago
  If I remember well, back then the black background wasn't perfect black, but something like very dark green. I have recently played again (with a LCD) games that I used to play as a kid with a CRT monitor and in some cases the colors look extremely ugly in the LCD. I don't know why
  - blueflow 4y ago
    Analog monitors like the CRTs back then suffered from artifact colors[1], LCDs do not. Games that were designed to account for these artifact colors do indeed look worse on LCDs. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composite_artifact_colors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composite_artifact_colors
    - badsectoracula 4y ago
      Note that this is for the crappy CRT TVs most people used (some home computers either connected to such TVs or used similarly bad CRTs). This was not an issue on computer monitors that were meant to display crisp text.
      - actionfromafar 4y ago
        Less so on computer monitors, but the raster on a CRT is not pixels. So graphics made for CRTs look worse on LCDs. Even low-res games on a CRT look less chunky than on LCD.
        teknopaul 4y ago
        The article mentions this the colours were not designed at all. It was an accident.
        actionfromafar 4y ago
        I thought we were talking about games in this subthread. The artwork was not an accident.
        blincoln 4y ago
        I think that is at least misleading, if not inaccurate. They may not have been "designed" in the sense of a graphic designer choosing the most pleasing or user-friendly colours, but there was logic behind the choices. They're the eight permutations (three primary colours (red, green, and blue), three secondary colours (yellow, cyan, and magenta), black, and white) that you get by setting each of the three RGB channels to either zero or maximum. It's not great for terminal text on a black background, but it's better than the CGA palette, IMO.
        rbanffy 4y ago
        1 bit each for R, G, and B, plus one for intensity IS the CGA text palette. Since it’s a digital signal, levels are dictated by IBM hardware. I remember there were numerous different monitors with slightly different palettes (defined by resistors between reference voltages and the analog electron gun power)
        NovemberWhiskey 4y ago
        They were designed for sure; just by an engineer rather than a graphic designer. Like: for each character cell on this terminal, we have an eight-bit memory budget for color. For each of foreground and background, we're going to allocate one bit for "bright" and one bit each for "red", "green" and "blue" ... in the output circuit to the DAC that drives the display, we're going to send a full-scale value for each of R/G/B when the "bright" bit is set and a half-scale value when it's not set.
- vikingerik 4y ago
  Is that inherent to CRTs? Windows and Mac used black text on white background in their GUIs from the beginning. Even some early text mode computers used a colored/bright background - my personal experience was on the TI-99 in its onboard BASIC environment. Scanlines were normal at the time - I think we only see them as ugly now after getting used to LCDs.
  - dfxm12 4y ago
    "in the beginnings with CRT" almost certainly refers to monochrome "green screen" monitors. The monitors you got with Macs and most monitors that came out with Windows 3.1 were pretty different.
    - leoc 4y ago
      Yes, it's certainly not impossible to display white backgrounds well on CRTs in general (consider upmarket late-'90s CRT monitors in particular, still overall decent displays by modern standards) but it wasn't to be taken for granted on early-'80s CRTs. White-background display conventions more or less came in with the Engelbart/PARC GUI and IIRC (I think Levy's Insanely Great or https://folklore.org https://folklore.org discusses this?) Apple put a lot of effort into making the original Mac's (and I assume Lisa's) monochrome display pleasant to use in that manner.
- floren 4y ago
  On the other hand, many video terminals (such as the VT100) could be put into a reverse mode, dark text on bright background, and I've seen it in enough old photographs to assume people actually used it pretty often.
  - someweirdperson 4y ago
    The screen of my first computer (b/w screen, late 80s) had a physical button to toggle inverted mode.
bartread 4y ago
I seem to remember that the Xerox Alto defaulted to a white or light grey background as well, and of course the same for early Macs. For me, in the 80s and 90s, lighter colour backgrounds - even on essentially monochrome displays - were generally a signifier of a higher end, or sometimes experimental, workstation machine or OS, than black backgrounds, which felt much more like corporate droneware. (Of course, that wasn't always the case: the Sinclair ZX81 and ZX Spectrum, both very cheap microcomputers introduced in the early 80s - and I think also maybe the Acorn Electron - defaulted to white backgrounds.)
rr888 4y ago
Sparc Terms were always the pinnacle of achievement for me. I prefer white backgrounds still today.
- rbanffy 4y ago
  And they had a gorgeous font. Solaris on x86 still defaults to it, but as white on black.
naniwaduni 4y ago
"Designed" is a stretch. Yellow and cyan become the nigh-unreadable colors instead with a white background.

blueflow 4y ago

Having a dark background used to be the default in the beginnings with CRT, colored/bright backgrounds look very ugly when you can see the distinct scanlines.

estebarb 4y ago
If I remember well, back then the black background wasn't perfect black, but something like very dark green. I have recently played again (with a LCD) games that I used to play as a kid with a CRT monitor and in some cases the colors look extremely ugly in the LCD. I don't know why
- blueflow 4y ago
  Analog monitors like the CRTs back then suffered from artifact colors[1], LCDs do not. Games that were designed to account for these artifact colors do indeed look worse on LCDs. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composite_artifact_colors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composite_artifact_colors
  - badsectoracula 4y ago
    Note that this is for the crappy CRT TVs most people used (some home computers either connected to such TVs or used similarly bad CRTs). This was not an issue on computer monitors that were meant to display crisp text.
    - actionfromafar 4y ago
      Less so on computer monitors, but the raster on a CRT is not pixels. So graphics made for CRTs look worse on LCDs. Even low-res games on a CRT look less chunky than on LCD.
      - teknopaul 4y ago
        The article mentions this the colours were not designed at all. It was an accident.
        actionfromafar 4y ago
        I thought we were talking about games in this subthread. The artwork was not an accident.
        blincoln 4y ago
        I think that is at least misleading, if not inaccurate. They may not have been "designed" in the sense of a graphic designer choosing the most pleasing or user-friendly colours, but there was logic behind the choices. They're the eight permutations (three primary colours (red, green, and blue), three secondary colours (yellow, cyan, and magenta), black, and white) that you get by setting each of the three RGB channels to either zero or maximum. It's not great for terminal text on a black background, but it's better than the CGA palette, IMO.
        rbanffy 4y ago
        1 bit each for R, G, and B, plus one for intensity IS the CGA text palette. Since it’s a digital signal, levels are dictated by IBM hardware. I remember there were numerous different monitors with slightly different palettes (defined by resistors between reference voltages and the analog electron gun power)
        NovemberWhiskey 4y ago
        They were designed for sure; just by an engineer rather than a graphic designer. Like: for each character cell on this terminal, we have an eight-bit memory budget for color. For each of foreground and background, we're going to allocate one bit for "bright" and one bit each for "red", "green" and "blue" ... in the output circuit to the DAC that drives the display, we're going to send a full-scale value for each of R/G/B when the "bright" bit is set and a half-scale value when it's not set.
vikingerik 4y ago
Is that inherent to CRTs? Windows and Mac used black text on white background in their GUIs from the beginning. Even some early text mode computers used a colored/bright background - my personal experience was on the TI-99 in its onboard BASIC environment. Scanlines were normal at the time - I think we only see them as ugly now after getting used to LCDs.
- dfxm12 4y ago
  "in the beginnings with CRT" almost certainly refers to monochrome "green screen" monitors. The monitors you got with Macs and most monitors that came out with Windows 3.1 were pretty different.
  - leoc 4y ago
    Yes, it's certainly not impossible to display white backgrounds well on CRTs in general (consider upmarket late-'90s CRT monitors in particular, still overall decent displays by modern standards) but it wasn't to be taken for granted on early-'80s CRTs. White-background display conventions more or less came in with the Engelbart/PARC GUI and IIRC (I think Levy's Insanely Great or https://folklore.org https://folklore.org discusses this?) Apple put a lot of effort into making the original Mac's (and I assume Lisa's) monochrome display pleasant to use in that manner.
floren 4y ago
On the other hand, many video terminals (such as the VT100) could be put into a reverse mode, dark text on bright background, and I've seen it in enough old photographs to assume people actually used it pretty often.
- someweirdperson 4y ago
  The screen of my first computer (b/w screen, late 80s) had a physical button to toggle inverted mode.

bartread 4y ago

I seem to remember that the Xerox Alto defaulted to a white or light grey background as well, and of course the same for early Macs. For me, in the 80s and 90s, lighter colour backgrounds - even on essentially monochrome displays - were generally a signifier of a higher end, or sometimes experimental, workstation machine or OS, than black backgrounds, which felt much more like corporate droneware. (Of course, that wasn't always the case: the Sinclair ZX81 and ZX Spectrum, both very cheap microcomputers introduced in the early 80s - and I think also maybe the Acorn Electron - defaulted to white backgrounds.)

rr888 4y ago

Sparc Terms were always the pinnacle of achievement for me. I prefer white backgrounds still today.

rbanffy 4y ago
And they had a gorgeous font. Solaris on x86 still defaults to it, but as white on black.

naniwaduni 4y ago

"Designed" is a stretch. Yellow and cyan become the nigh-unreadable colors instead with a white background.