alt Hacker NewsShow HN: Desktopcolors.com – A museum for solid background colors of classic OS
Hi HN, in my last vacation, I built desktopcolors.com as a place to collect iconic solid background colors. Let me know what you think.
Comments
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...
This isn't a "desktop," but C64's dark blue background appears to be RGB (64, 50, 133). That was the color of my early childhood.
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.
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.
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.
Huh, I do not remember Windows 1.0 being that shade of green but screenshots confirm what's here.
No os² feel like this list should have gotten more entries and love before publishing
This is great. I've been meaning to work out what windows NT background colour is for years. My desktop now is solid that :)
First I looked for was Atari 1040 STE TOS green background, and it's not there. Bummer.
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!
For the past 20+ years I'm using the same desktop color across various OSes: #000000 This is one of the first things that I modify on a fresh install.
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.
There's no "Hot Dog Stand", so the collection is incomplete.
I sometimes catch myself recreating the Win95 color on my Mac. Thanks for this!
Where's plan9?
Delightful, even if I don’t recall Solaris
OS X Aqua Blue!
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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.