The true story of the Windows 3.1 'Hot Dog Stand' color scheme

Thanks for sharing! I was pleased I was able to track down Virginia and she had a clear memory of how Hot Dog Stand came to be.

Unlike the Hot Dog Stand theme, the "Plasma Power Saver" theme also featured in the article actually was function over form, not just an aesthetic choice (or lack thereof). It was to reduce burn-in on the plasma displays of old portable computers, e.g. here [0].

[0] https://retro.swarm.cz/20170331/windows-31-running-on-ibm-ps...

I'm amused she said they included it "in case somebody out there liked ugly bright red and yellow" and that "the 'Fluorescent' theme was also pretty ugly, but it didn't have a catchy name, so I've never heard anything about it."

Because I loved the Fluorescent theme.

Back when users picked the UI colors for the apps instead of the apps picking for the users.

This made me search and find this, screenshots of every win 3.11 theme:

https://imgur.com/gallery/every-windows-3-1-theme-SsVYqM1

at least half were painfully ugly

Legend.

My sway setup is everything as all black as I can get but with any accents as small and bright - neon green and eye bleeding magenta - as possible. So Fluorescent speaks to me.

I remember as a kid using 3.11 and win 95 and cycling through the themes, trying them all out for a day or two to decide which I wanted to use. You know, important decisions. Anyway, in an eternal black mark on my character I didn't even consider Hot Dog Stand.

I'd rather use 3.1 with the hot dog scheme vs. windows 11...

as long as it has trumpet winsock

A non-obvious reason that I think the yellow background would've looked especially bad to people at the time, is that most people doing non-gaming on PCs at the time were using MS-DOS programs in text mode, with 4&3-bit color, where it was very unusual for the background color to be bright.

(It was technically possible to get a bright background color on PCs in text mode, but very few programs did that.)

As a kid I actually used the theme on my first hand-me-down. As the regular theme. And I remember chosing it because it was fun! It made my computer more fun.

At the end of the day, usability shouldn't trump fun. If I find it's less usable, I can switch back.

Back in my day, changing the windows color pallets was the only form of video game we had.

And we liked it!

This brings up so many memories

We've now seemed to have invented glass, but in some kind of a parodic form.

[dead]