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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.