After the blue LED came onto the market in the 1990s, it took less than a decade for them to become shelf items of a couple dollars each at electronics retailer

After the blue LED came onto the market in the 1990s, it took less than a decade for them to become shelf items of a couple dollars each at electronics retailers. It was also around that time that web-based communities of computer technicians really took off. Web forums, etc. The coincidence led (yup!) to a love-at-first-sight relationship. Funny as it may seem now, being a mere 20 years later (or: "holy crap, it's been 20 years!, how did that happen??"), there were a few years there in the 2000-2005 region during which the de-riguer of computer nerdery was to go blue LED crazy. It felt elite, cutting edge, rare, oh-so-techy. And it's funny now, to look back at the windowed PC cases full of LEDs and garishly lit by cold cathode tubes, with our mouses and speakers and other electronic gadgets painstakingly swapped over to blue. And within a further couple of years - from about 2005 onward, if not sooner - the commercial market had taken over the trend and made it boring, passe. We hackers and overclockers weren't interested any more. Indeed, these ultra bright things began to get annoying. Within about 5 years the modding scene's blue LED craze began, peaked, commercialised, became a liability ... at which point we began to hastily obscure our blinding modifications with another, very different, product whose very identity hinges upon the colour blue : Blu-Tack! [0] So where did it all end up, this short-lived cultural crossover between blue LEDs and hackers? Well, basically, the commercial market morphed into the "RGB" movement of lit-up computer hardware. RGB fans, RGB cases, RGB panels on graphics cards, etc. But I still think the blue LED is pretty cool. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu_Tack https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blu_Tack