Huh, I do not remember Windows 1.0 being that shade of green but screenshots confirm what's here.
It probably looked much less neon bright on the displays of the time. Same for Windows 2.0.
Show HN: Desktopcolors.com – A museum for solid background colors of classic OS
31–40 of 77 posts
Re: Show HN: Desktopcolors.com – A museum for solid background colors of classic OS
#32When I was just getting into Linux and trying out all the random window managers, I found that I really liked the hues of green and purple that Blackbox came with.
Re: Show HN: Desktopcolors.com – A museum for solid background colors of classic OS
#33When I was just getting into Linux and trying out all the random window managers, I found that I really liked the hues of green and purple that Blackbox came with.
I agree, Blackbox is still one of the WMs on my wishlist.
Re: Show HN: Desktopcolors.com – A museum for solid background colors of classic OS
#34One nerdy detail about old operating systems and graphics cards: due to the way the VGA color palette works, the teal background used in Windows 98 and earlier versions of Windows was actually lighter than #008080 if the computer was configured to use 16 colors (not 256 colors): https://twitter.com/bakertechsrvcs/status/162629846037367193... https://xcancel.com/bakertechsrvcs/status/162629846037367193... Another nerd…
I always liked the feeling of getting a proper video driver installed and unlocking "true color" support, the desktop background and icons were suddenly much richer and saturated.
Re: Show HN: Desktopcolors.com – A museum for solid background colors of classic OS
#35Some overlooked iconic backgrounds/color-schemes for me:
NeXTSTEP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP#/media/File:NeXTSTEP_...
Plan9/Rio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs#/media/F...
Re: Show HN: Desktopcolors.com – A museum for solid background colors of classic OS
#36This isn't a "desktop," but C64's dark blue background appears to be #403285. That was the color of my very early childhood.
Re: Show HN: Desktopcolors.com – A museum for solid background colors of classic OS
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seconded. The "personality" it tries to add is trite and tiresome and everybody immediately sees it for what it is, especially for a case like this where there's only so many ways to say "this is the default desktop color of an operating system." Not only that, but it's confusing - is "Windows Classic blue" a real thing, or just an attempt at a cute phrase? Just label the colors and be done with it.
It's actually not so easy to pick a speaking name for each color, since many colors are used in different OSs. I tried to use neutral and standard color names were they exist. Things like Windows Classic blue are probably always description-slop, though. Another user suggested to use media quotes etc. on OSs, which I think is actually a pretty good idea. I might swap the LLM generated placeholders for something like…
Why do you even need the text? Just show the color, year and the name of the OS.
Re: Show HN: Desktopcolors.com – A museum for solid background colors of classic OS
#38The descriptions under the colors are very obviously LLM generated and make little sense. No human would make statements like what is written under each entry. Contains many LLM-isms like em-dashes, loaded words, and load-bearing phrases (emphasis intended). Consider removing or rewriting those bits.
Re: Show HN: Desktopcolors.com – A museum for solid background colors of classic OS
#39When I was just getting into Linux and trying out all the random window managers, I found that I really liked the hues of green and purple that Blackbox came with.
Update: I went into the source code and found the colors I was fond of. I didn't care for the red but I'm including it for completeness
Grey: #aaaaaa Green: #77aa77 Purple: #9077aa Blue: #7790aa Red: #aa5555
Source: https://github.com/bradleythughes/blackbox/tree/master/data/...
Re: Show HN: Desktopcolors.com – A museum for solid background colors of classic OS
#40Huh, I do not remember Windows 1.0 being that shade of green but screenshots confirm what's here.
Interestingly, none of the screenshots I can find show the dithering that the article talks about, and all the contemporary photographs of monitors show a less green blue background. I think maybe something is being lost in emulation?