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Show HN: Desktopcolors.com – A museum for solid background colors of classic OS

desktopcolors.com

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Re: Show HN: Desktopcolors.com – A museum for solid background colors of classic OS

#62

Post by smackeyacky »

t0mas88 wrote: post #53
torh wrote: post #16

My 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.

I agree, the color was great, and also in general Windows 2000 was very good. I used both the desktop and server versions for years. After that Windows XP made me switch to Linux. Since then I've only really used Debian and Mac OS. I recently tried installing Windows 11 on a PC to run some games. The contrast with Windows 2000 is crazy, what a mess. Even just the control panel has three different UI frameworks mixed…

It’s a long, desperate and complicated tale as the Windows team, frightened by their own shadows, attempted to head off any and all possible competition. From web views to tablet interfaces and every other mistake you can see the legacy of it in windows 11. The tablet/touch screen panic also affected Linux as well but at least most of the worst of that has been fixed.

When I get jobs to work on older systems I get a visceral sick feeling whenever the server version of windows with the touch screen interface comes up in RDP. Hideous and useless.

Win2k was easily the best thing they ever did. Every version of server since then has pushed admins to linux

Re: Show HN: Desktopcolors.com – A museum for solid background colors of classic OS

#64

Post by vlowrian »

colinhb wrote: post #35

Some 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...

Noted. Plan9/Rio was actually on my list for the initial release, but it is currently broken in the Virtual OS Museum (https://virtualosmuseum.org/) and I couldn't find any other reliable sources.

But it's still on the todo list and I've also added NeXTSTEP.

Re: Show HN: Desktopcolors.com – A museum for solid background colors of classic OS

#65

Post by vlowrian »

kjellsbells wrote: post #61

love it. Would love to see the grey/orange/blue/dark pink of CDE from the late 90s. But I'd especially love the gray on mottled gray of 1995 vintage Sun OpenWindows!

Oh wow, I never used OpenWindows and I just googled it. I definitely need that in the collection! Noted :)

Re: Show HN: Desktopcolors.com – A museum for solid background colors of classic OS

#67

Post by d3Xt3r »

millerm wrote: post #24
danirod wrote: post #5

One 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 remember that good feeling when getting a new windows 9x machine up and running or installing a new video card, updating the graphics driver to get the display into 16M colors, and enjoying the darker teal. The color itself felt like an upgrade. When that brighter teal appeared you knew you didn't have the driver set, even before seeing any icons. Man, I wish I could have the 90s back. I absolutely despise where we…

I'm with you, the 90s were cool, especially early computing days when things were equally quirky and equally magical.

On that graphics drivers note, I recall some video drivers were just so bad back then you might not get the full colors or resolution depending on your setup. Or some games might just look weird. But there was a cool thirdparty driver called UniVBE from SciTech[1] that you could install for almost any card and suddenly everything looked and worked so much more better, it was like magic. It was one of the go-to utilities I'd always carry around with me in my bag of floppy disks, full of unique, wonderous tools that the world has probably forgotten by now.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UniVBE

Re: Show HN: Desktopcolors.com – A museum for solid background colors of classic OS

#69

Post by vlowrian »

cdieck88 wrote: post #66

Wow, cool idea! Where did you get all the information from? Did you pick the color schemes by analyzing all the images you found on the web?

Thanks! I didn't use any screenshots as sources, because I a) wanted to scrape all possible options, b) want to make sure the default is really what you would get after a fresh install and c) was afraid that a screenshot might introduce some kind of color drift, compared to the original value the OS defines.

I mostly used things like the fantastic Virtual OS Museum (https://virtualosmuseum.org/), run-in-browser VMs like PCJs Machines (https://www.pcjs.org/blog/2015/09/21/) or real installations inside a VM. I tried to avoid using Color Pickers etc. and read the actual value from the OS somehow (e.g. copy the HEX value shown in the UI), but in some cases, I had to go with the macOS Digital Colour Meter (set to sRGB).

Re: Show HN: Desktopcolors.com – A museum for solid background colors of classic OS

#70

Post by pfeher »

Nice one, travelled back in time a bit. One thing that was unexpected for me is when you hover on the circles in the Known Uses section of a color, I expeceted that the given OS will be shown as a tooltip (maybe also clickable) and I don't need to click on the "View all X palettes" link. But lovely idea, thanks for sharing.
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