alt Hacker News>"Back in the day," computers displayed white text on a dark background (usually a blue background) out of the box. This was deemed the most legible.
That just prevented CRT degradation and it had less ghosting and flickering, especially as most CRTs in the home computer era were just terrible home TVs, and CRTs in the mainframe era were equally terrible. The saturated blue background was absolutely insufferable and I had ghosting and shifted color perception for minutes after using NC and Borland software for a long time. I loathe it till this day, just like garish CGA colors which were an assault on my eyes.
80's and 90's had a general concept of a desktop with windows as paper documents, because the first real use case for personal computers and workstations was assisting office jobs.
Funny how you call the normal light scheme inverted. IIRC PC text/graphics modes used this term for dark backgrounds.
It was not a screen-saver. Less ghosting? Most likely. But the fact remains that reading text off of a light bulb blasting in your face all day sucks, and once upon a time people knew that... but "forgot" it when vendors shoved inverse color schemes on them by default.
"80's and 90's had a general concept of a desktop with windows as paper documents"
Yes, I noted that; but the analogy to a piece of paper fails because paper does not EMIT light.
Everyone with sufficient computing experience calls "light" schemes inverted. This was even documented in instruction manuals from the early PC era: https://imgur.com/a/aLV8tn0