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  • Hacker News
  • Huh, I do not remember Windows 1.0 being that shade of green but screenshots confirm what's here.
    by scrumper
  • It probably looked much less neon bright on the displays of the time. Same for Windows 2.0.
    by Narishma
  • 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?
    by pavon
  • It's strange how seeing the default NT4 and 2k colours take me straight back to a fresh install 25+ years ago. First job was doing desktop rollouts so I'd see it a lot!
    by _joel
  • Windows 2008 is the teal desktop I remember fondly - they brought it back after going blue in Windows 2003. I'm presuming it was the same #008080 shade as '95 & '98.
    by lucideer
  • When 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.
    by summermusic
  • I agree, Blackbox is still one of the WMs on my wishlist.
    by vlowrian
  • 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/...

    by summermusic
  • This isn't a "desktop," but C64's dark blue background appears to be #403285. That was the color of my very early childhood.
    by consumer451
  • DOS #000000
    by nobrains
  • The 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.
    by VCFundedGenYer
  • 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.
    by torh
  • Same. The lighter gray 2000 uses compared to 9x is also much more pleasant.

    It might sound ridiculous but using 9x with the default theme felt a bit depressing. It conjures images of being stuck in a building with that awful fluorescent overhead lighting on a day where it’s dark and dreary outside.

    2000 on the other hand is about as refreshing as a gray 3D beveled OS theme can look, on par with Mac OS platinum and maybe slightly edged out by the bright colorful sunny tab titlebars of BeOS.

    by cosmic_cheese
  • I can understand using an llm to build your website. But I can't understand using it to write copy, especially when it's so unnecessary here.
    by flowercalled
  • Agreed. A bit of context on that: I wanted to add some fun facts or relevant information to some of the colors, OSs, etc. and I wrote this in German and let the LLM do the translation. However,it looked pretty weird when navigating through the page and most colors and roughly half of the OSs did show up with an empty label. So it was a visual decision to let the LLM fill in the gaps.

    But you're right. It's damaging to the actual facts and research I added myself. It might be better to remove the text where it's just an LLM placeholder.

    Larger copies (like about and privacy) are written by me and then LLM translated.

    by vlowrian
  • 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.
    by rideontime
  • It'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.

    by ocdjeremy
  • 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...

    by colinhb
  • 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 nerdy detail: the default background color on Windows XP was different depending on whether the theme was Luna or Classic. On Classic it is the same one as Windows 2000, but for Luna it is more blueish. I understand the denial, but it will be the 25st anniversary of the XP release in a few months, so it probably qualifies as classic by now.

    by danirod
  • That's cool, thanks for sharing. I like the idea of adding XP as an anniversary gift ;)
    by vlowrian
  • 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 went with tech in the past decade. I suppose that's a me problem.

    by millerm
  • 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.
    by accrual
  • 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.
    by keito