DOS #000000
Show HN: Desktopcolors.com – A museum for solid background colors of classic OS
41–50 of 77 posts
Re: Show HN: Desktopcolors.com – A museum for solid background colors of classic OS
#42It's often said that scent is tightly associated with memory, but simply looking at these colors sends me on multiple trips down memory lane.
I second the post from imfemambocus on color-sampling provenance. It would be useful to know the exact source for each.
Re: Show HN: Desktopcolors.com – A museum for solid background colors of classic OS
#43One 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…
The top-right (16 color) version gives me a "safe mode" tingly sensation :) I didn't know about the Luna/Classic distinction - I guess you don't usually see the Luna color since it's hidden behind Bliss.
Re: Show HN: Desktopcolors.com – A museum for solid background colors of classic OS
#44BleskOS's color seems... offensive. Perhaps they don't want people living on their desktop.
Re: Show HN: Desktopcolors.com – A museum for solid background colors of classic OS
#45I like the colors but I'm personally getting very sick of every single website using That One Font Claude Likes for everything.
I think the mono is IBM Plex? Idk what the other one is, but I'll be looking it up so as to be certain i never use it in my projects lol
Re: Show HN: Desktopcolors.com – A museum for solid background colors of classic OS
#46My favorite was the blue in Windows 2000. Never cared much for the green in Windows 95/98. When installing Windows 98 later (because games) I would try to set up the same blue. Instead of getting it correct, I guessed, and ended up with #336699 which was easy to remember and "close enough". I see now that it's closer to Haiku (almost perfect, #336698) than Windows 2000.
Windows 2000 is the epitome of Windows UI to me, probably because my first PC had Me which borrowed the desktop from it. As i kid I didn't even notice it was different from the 98 machines at school, but when i set up 98SE for retro gaming as an adult I couldn't shake this "something isn't quite how i remember" feeling.
Then i set up 2000 as a server for the retro machines and everything clicked. Kind of amazing how many control panels in Windows 10 and 11 are essentially unchanged from 2000
Re: Show HN: Desktopcolors.com – A museum for solid background colors of classic OS
#47I can't even describe how many spots this hit for me.
Re: Show HN: Desktopcolors.com – A museum for solid background colors of classic OS
#48Some 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...
I always loved that purple/slate blue colour of WindowMaker/GNUStep/NeXTSTEP.
Re: Show HN: Desktopcolors.com – A museum for solid background colors of classic OS
#49I can't even describe how many spots this hit for me.
I was pretty surprised at how I both immediately recognized each desktop color, but also how each of them "felt". I could picture the icons and menus in my mind, and their location (left, right, top, bottom) and knew how the mouse would respond as well.
I suspect there's some sort of strong association going on with color and tool use in our monkey brains.
Re: Show HN: Desktopcolors.com – A museum for solid background colors of classic OS
#50The one thing I would add to each swatch is where the number came from. A value read out of a palette table and a value sampled from a screenshot are not the same number, and the difference is invisible. I ran into this today on something unrelated. A page painted #0b0d14, and macOS screencapture wrote rgb(8,13,16) into the file, because the capture lands in the display's colour space rather than sRGB. Handing that s…
The Mac also ran with a different gamma correction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma_correction#Computer_disp...:
“In most computer display systems, images are encoded with a gamma of about 0.45 and decoded with the reciprocal gamma of 2.2. A notable exception, until the release of Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) in September 2009, were Macintosh computers, which encoded with a gamma of 0.55 and decoded with a gamma of 1.8”