[HN Gopher] Why are hyperlinks blue?
___________________________________________________________________
Why are hyperlinks blue?
Author : TangerineDream
Score : 291 points
Date : 2021-08-26 15:10 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.mozilla.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.mozilla.org)
| barbazoo wrote:
| Even though some facts might be wrong as others have pointed out,
| I just love reading about the history of the internet on a higher
| level and how it came about. I wish I could have been involved in
| that in its early stages. Truly transformative.
| Santosh83 wrote:
| > Interactive states should always be styled in your stylesheets.
| Examples include: touch, visited, hover, active and focus.
|
| Agree in general, but I wonder if a separate style for visited
| hyperlinks is still useful these days? Does anyone benefit by
| visited links being differentiated (by colour or another means)
| from unvisited ones?
| godshatter wrote:
| When I'm at a site with many different topics in a list, it's
| nice to see which ones I've already visited. Links that don't
| show this or (even worse) don't differentiate as a link until
| they are moused over are one of my pet peeves.
| hunter2_ wrote:
| There are countless reddit comments that mention gleaning
| information from purple links, because it's useful.
| onychomys wrote:
| One thing that's always bugged me about the HN interface is that
| visited links are basically the same color as the metadata below
| them. Makes it hard to just glance at a screen and see the
| stories you've already clicked on.
| blibble wrote:
| there's a special place in hell for people that remove the
| underline from hyperlinks
| DonHopkins wrote:
| There is also a level of hell where reified retired 3D
| company logos swoop around booming out thumping techno trade
| show floor music, spinning, bowing, and pirouetting around
| with each other. Somewhere the old SUN and SGI and DIGITAL
| are still dancing.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| No, visited links are grey. That's the default. I've seen "new"
| stories appear that are grey links because they were popular
| weeks earlier and I had already read them. Maybe reset your
| defaults?
| grawprog wrote:
| The metadata below stories are also grey. I think that was
| the GP comment's point. Both visited links and metadata are
| grey.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| Oh, I see, I misunderstood. Thanks!
| floor_ wrote:
| Spoiler, this article doesn't answer the question.
| sleavey wrote:
| Another curiosity related to this one is why <h5> and <h6> have
| smaller default font sizes than <p>, given that they are headers
| and should therefore "head" a section of text [1].
|
| [1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/55696808/why-
| do-h5-and-h...
| Terretta wrote:
| They weren't when I started web designing. As noted in that
| excellent answer.
| codazoda wrote:
| I was kind of surprised the article didn't discuss the BBS
| culture that existed before the internet. The blue link may have
| started after this but maybe it borrowed a bit from the colored
| keyboard characters used in text-based menu systems.
|
| I also used the something-folio hypertext system before I used
| hypertext on the web. Did it have blue links? I can't remember.
| LocalPCGuy wrote:
| I was looking for information on BBS culture also, but in my
| fuzzy memory of those times, the vast majority were very much a
| dark color scheme, black/dark background with light text. And
| there was a lot of customization going on as well, but I don't
| know if I can see BBSes as a place the link color came from.
| It's also probably one of the most obscured and overlooked part
| leading to the rise of the internet, I rarely see it mentioned
| in "history of" articles.
| blibble wrote:
| there was a short period of time in Windows 95 (I think with the
| shell update) where everything became a blue hyperlink
|
| including the shortcuts on your desktop (which now functioned
| with a single click)
|
| it was awful
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Probably Win98, the "Internet integrated into Windows" version.
|
| (DoJ had some thoughts on that.)
| mattl wrote:
| It was also available for Windows 95 too as an IE "upgrade"
| ridaj wrote:
| > What happened in 1993 to suddenly make hyperlinks blue? No one
| knows, but I have some theories.
|
| I doubt that no one knows. They found the smoking gun in the
| Mosaic release notes - the people who worked there are probably
| still alive and might remember why!
| joking wrote:
| this is the perfect example of how to write something wrong on
| internet, so you can get all the correct facts for free from
| strangers and you can write a correct article
| lordgrenville wrote:
| (aka Cunningham's Law)
| not2b wrote:
| The answer is "Mosaic", even if someone can find some other
| earlier use of blue. They chose it, and Netscape kept it, which
| meant that everyone was trained to expect it.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| 1993? Not so sure about "simply because color monitors were
| becoming more popular around this time."
|
| Having lived through the 80s with computers and owning a
| Commodore 1084 I'd say most had color much earlier.
|
| I remember using the ViolaWww browser on a color XTerminal in
| 1992.
| janvdberg wrote:
| Semi-related: I recently learned [1] that there is a third color
| associated with links: blue for standard, purple for visited, and
| red WHILE actively clicking the link (I don't think I noticed
| this before).
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HLdDvQym5xk
| themodelplumber wrote:
| Link, Visited, Hover, Active...I think you're referring to the
| last one?
|
| I remember learning these with the LoVe / HAte mnemonic for
| CSS. Maybe from Cameron Moll, can't remember...
| [deleted]
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| I knew this was introduced by NCSA Mosaic. I remember it well.
|
| It was actually a very good browser. Not as many features as
| Netscape but it was very fast. Netscape added too many fluff
| features like backgrounds and moving GIFs which were abused way
| too much (see any "1990s retro web site" for what I mean), so I
| often opted to using Mosaic even after Netscape became
| mainstream.
|
| It makes sense too, black doesn't stand out enough from unlinked
| text. And can be confused with regular non-link underlining. It
| could have been any colour but it's a good convention. After all
| we could also have used green for stop and red for go (like in
| the first episode of "Sliders" :) ), but at least everyone around
| the world uses the same.
| itomato wrote:
| ...X11R3.
|
| https://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/support/html/Docs/resources...
|
| anchorColor: color Color to shade anchors whose corresponding
| documents haven't been previously visited. Default is blue3.
|
| visitedAnchorColor: color Color to shade anchors whose
| corresponding documents have been previously visited. Default is
| violetred4.
|
| activeAnchorFG: color Color to shade anchors that are in the
| process of being activated. Default is red.
|
| activeAnchorBG: color Color to shade the background of anchors
| that are in the process of being activated. Default is grey80
| (the same color as the application's background).
| richardwhiuk wrote:
| Don't see any evidence X11R3 is involved?
|
| That's just the docs for Mosaic which TFA says was responsible.
| robbrown451 wrote:
| Seems pretty obvious to me that blue is the color that gives best
| contrast to a white background, while not being black or being so
| dark a color that the hue doesn't stand out. This is why blue
| pens are considered the only acceptable pen for writing (such as
| filling in a form, or a school paper) other than black.
|
| Similar to the reason to use yellow for highlighter and otherwise
| for changing the background color, you want a light color whose
| hue is detectable, but it similar enough to the white background
| that text is still easy to read.
|
| The Munsell color solid is distorted to show that pure yellow is
| light, pure blue is dark.
|
| https://art-design-glossary.musabi.ac.jp/wpwp/wp-content/upl...
| Terretta wrote:
| > _blue is the color_
|
| Yes. If you were handed a printout or photo copy in 1980s with
| some terms or phrases manually marked to stand out, it was
| probably with blue underlines. Black didn't stand out, red was
| for corrections.
|
| That simple.
| ducttapecrown wrote:
| Blue links turn purple because they get red.
| dotancohen wrote:
| Yellow, world!
| dredmorbius wrote:
| You realise on HN that this will be rated as a greyed
| comment?
| omar_kha wrote:
| yet this website has black links
| EGreg wrote:
| This article is so strange, even though it is hosted by Mozilla.
| Here is straight from the horse's mouth, I remember Tim Berners-
| Lee reminiscing about green links originally
|
| _A: There is no reason why one should use color, or blue, to
| signify links: it is just a default. I think the first WWW client
| (WorldWideWeb I wrote for the NeXT) used just underline to
| represent link, as it was a spare emphasis form which isn 't used
| much in real documents. Blue came in as browsers went color - I
| don't remember which was the first to use blue. You can change
| the defaults in most browsers, and certainly in HTML documents,
| and of course with CSS style sheets. There are many examples of
| style sheets which use different colors.
|
| My guess is that blue is the darkest color and so threatens the
| legibility least. I used green whenever I could in the early WWW
| design, for nature and because it is supposed to be relaxing.
| Robert Cailliau made the WWW icon in many colors but chose green
| as he had always seen W in his head as green.
|
| One of the nicest link renditions was Dave Raggett's "Arena"
| browser which had a textured parchment background and embossed
| out the words of the link with a square apparently raised area._
|
| https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/FAQ.html
| michaelhoffman wrote:
| I believe OS/2 1.2's help system used a different color for
| hyperlinks but it's hard to find a definitive screenshot.
| gjvc wrote:
| dunno, but I wish we'd started out with all browser default CSS
| looking like twitter bootstrap 2.3.2 rather than the bevelled
| tables and clunky buttons there were, and which took ages to
| shake.
| timw4mail wrote:
| I'm rather fond of buttons that look like buttons, rather than
| colored rectangles or buttons that look like links, because
| they have affordances to what they can do.
|
| Bootstrap is a good tool for CSS, but I think it also over-
| legitimzed restyling and reinventing native HTML interactive
| elements.
| egypturnash wrote:
| _Everything_ looked like that, those clunky bevels fit _right_
| in with the operating systems of the time.
| js2 wrote:
| From https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/FAQ.html
|
| Q: I'm a student of visual communications and asked myself why
| links are blue. I found some answers that might be, for example
| blue is a color of learning, but I'm not sure what is right. Is
| there any reason, why links are colored blue ?
|
| A: There is no reason why one should use color, or blue, to
| signify links: it is just a default. I think the first WWW client
| (WorldWideWeb I wrote for the NeXT) used just underline to
| represent link, as it was a spare emphasis form which isn't used
| much in real documents. Blue came in as browsers went color - I
| don't remember which was the first to use blue. You can change
| the defaults in most browsers, and certainly in HTML documents,
| and of course with CSS style sheets. There are many examples of
| style sheets which use different colors.
|
| My guess is that blue is the darkest color and so threatens the
| legibility least. I used green whenever I could in the early WWW
| design, for nature and because it is supposed to be relaxing.
| Robert Cailliau made the WWW icon in many colors but chose green
| as he had always seen W in his head as green.
|
| One of the nicest link renditions was Dave Raggett's "Arena"
| browser which had a textured parchment background and embossed
| out the words of the link with a square apparently raised area.
|
| [See also https://www.crazyegg.com/blog/why-hyperlinks-are-blue/
| which links to the answer above but also contains a few other
| references.]
| gabereiser wrote:
| I believe this is the correct answer. It was the default for
| Netscape navigator back in early 90s. If you wrote an html page
| without styles it gave you a white background, blue hyperlinks,
| and times new roman font. As for _why_ the default for NN was
| blue, I really don't know other than the juxtaposition of it vs
| normal text. To claim it was mosaic would align with my history
| of it with NN though.
| Terretta wrote:
| If someone in 1989 handed you an article with occasional
| markings added indicating important terms or concepts, it was
| probably a blue underline, which contrasted and stood out
| nicely from the black photocopy or print.
| askvictor wrote:
| I'm wondering why they chose a serif font as the default,
| given their rendering on low-res screens (as most were at
| that time) is pretty bad.
| eropple wrote:
| I've wondered this before, but never found much concrete.
| My intuition is that it comes from books/newspapers and
| nascent desktop publishing universes; sans-serif fonts
| being used for large amounts of body text anywhere, on
| paper or not, is relatively new as a mainstream thing.
| (That isn't to say it never happened, just that it's
| historically rare.)
| cma wrote:
| Blue is the least dense rod cell, so shows up best against
| white over any other color. Green is the most dense rod cell,
| so shows up best against black.
|
| This is why Apple makes Android users have white on green text,
| the least readable choice.
| jsf01 wrote:
| Why would Apple have made white on green the default for so
| many years prior to introducing blue?
| irrational wrote:
| I first used the WWW in 1995 (after seeing a fellow student in a
| computer lab looking at sports scores in a browser and asking him
| what he was looking at) and, of course, it used blue for links at
| that time. That fact that it took this article, 26 years after I
| first saw the WWW and 25 years after I built my first web page,
| to question why hyperlinks are blue makes me laugh. What else
| have I never questioned because it was always that way?
| alex_young wrote:
| Hmm. I don't see any discussion here, but weren't BBS links
| typically blue? I think I remember that being a thing, and that
| was well before 1993...
|
| Also, cyan is a much better color for text on a black background.
| Dark blue is almost invisible. This makes some of the early
| examples a little complicated since we moved to white backgrounds
| around the same time as the web came to fruition.
| kps wrote:
| > _we moved to white backgrounds around the same time as the
| web came to fruition_
|
| 'We'? Document-oriented workstations, including the one WWW was
| developed on, routinely used black-on-white back to the Alto,
| or NLS. (CAD stayed white-on-black due to the history of vector
| displays.)
| reaperducer wrote:
| In my BBS days (I ran a node of ARB Net), BBSes were black
| background by default with white text. "Links" were just key
| presses.
|
| Press [SPACE] for next screen, or as it was commonly known,
| "Spank the blank."
|
| [G] for the document repository. Or as it was commonly called
| "G-Philes."
| egypturnash wrote:
| Not "G-Philez"?
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| It was working as designed. If you already visited that page,
| you don't need to go there again. Time was precious on dial-uo
| connections, better go visit some new page instead!
| dotancohen wrote:
| Actually, Mozilla had a great CEO but he was "cancelled" for not
| being woke enough. They then hired another CEO at four times his
| salary who drove the company to what it is today.
| jamienicol wrote:
| Given Brendan Eich was CEO of Mozilla for all of 11 days it
| seems slightly speculative to claim he was a "great" CEO
| somnic wrote:
| I mean, if Brendan Eich's known for anything it's for getting
| a lot done in 10 days.
| Lammy wrote:
| /me hangs up javascript phone
| https://www.bonequest.com/5546
| dang wrote:
| Please don't take HN threads into flamewar hell.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| We detached this subthread from
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28317106.
| [deleted]
| DonHopkins wrote:
| How many times does this need to be repeated?
|
| Mozilla didn't fire Brendan Eich. He resigned of his own free
| will, against the Mozilla board's request that he stay. His own
| words and the Mozilla FAQ quoted below, I'm not just making
| this up. Down the following thread, Brendan suggested googling
| "constructive separation" -- but I'm not sure if he meant for
| that euphemism to apply to how he left his job at Mozilla, or
| to how he wanted to cancel and destroy existing happy same sex
| marriages in California against their consent. All of the
| google results have to do with marriage, not employment.
| Brendan, care to clarify?
|
| As JavaScript proves, Brendan Eich never really understood the
| concept of equality: https://dorey.github.io/JavaScript-
| Equality-Table/
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24127716
|
| DonHopkins 3 months ago | on: Mozilla lays off 250 employees
| while it refocuses ...
|
| Eich was not forced out or fired. In fact, just the opposite:
| the board actually tried to get Eich to stay, but he decided to
| leave all on his own. Don't try to rewrite history to make an
| ideological point. It's all very well and unambiguously
| documented what really happened, and there's no excuse for you
| spreading that misinformation.
|
| https://blog.mozilla.org/blog/2014/04/05/faq-on-ceo-resignat...
|
| Q: Was Brendan Eich fired?
|
| A: No, Brendan Eich resigned. Brendan himself said:
|
| "I have decided to resign as CEO effective April 3rd, and leave
| Mozilla. Our mission is bigger than any one of us, and under
| the present circumstances, I cannot be an effective leader. I
| will be taking time before I decide what to do next."
|
| Brendan Eich also blogged on this topic.
|
| Q: Was Brendan Eich asked to resign by the Board?
|
| A: No. It was Brendan's idea to resign, and in fact, once he
| submitted his resignation, Board members tried to get Brendan
| to stay at Mozilla in another C-level role.
|
| It's a common misconception which is a key part of the
| narrative that Brendan's Alt-Right Incel GamerGate supporters
| were doing their best to spread at the time (GamerGate was in
| full swing when he resigned, and the Alt-Right jumped on the
| issue at the expense of Mozilla), in order to help Brendan play
| the victim (instead of respecting Brendan's own victims and co-
| workers whose marriages he wanted to terminate) and make him a
| martyr. (Not that I think you're one of them, but they
| unfortunately succeeded at spreading the misconception that
| Brendan was fired far and wide, in the service of their
| cultural war.)
|
| Edit: And do you acknowledge that Brendan wanted to cancel many
| same sex marriages in California? And do you agree or disagree
| with him that those marriages should have been canceled?
| Because he got what he paid for, Proposition 8 passed, and
| those marriages WERE canceled. Which is worse: canceling one
| job, or thousands of marriages?
|
| Edit 2: It's pretty rich that Brendan would claim to be the one
| suffering from a hostile work environment, when he was the one
| who wanted to destroy the marriages of his co-workers and
| users. Was it too much for him to bear facing the dirty looks
| of his co-workers who he didn't believe deserved the same
| rights as he enjoyed? Bullies are always playing the victim.
|
| Breaking apart other people's marriages sounds more like
| "destructive separation" to me.
| kevinslashslash wrote:
| Excellent comment. For "constructive separation", if giving
| him benefit of the doubt, the relevant employment term seems
| to be Constructive Dismissal (or discharge or termination).
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructive_dismissal
|
| "when an employee resigns as a result of the employer
| creating a hostile work environment. Since the resignation
| was not truly voluntary, it is, in effect, a termination. For
| example, when an employer places extraordinary and
| unreasonable work demands on an employee to obtain their
| resignation, this can constitute a constructive dismissal."
| WillDaSilva wrote:
| This is a wonderful example of how much more effort is
| required to counter a false claim than to make said false
| claim. Thank you for putting in the effort.
| dotancohen wrote:
| I never said he was fired. I said that he was cancelled. That
| is a term used for pressuring someone out of a community.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| What is the term for legally pressuring thousands of people
| out of their marriages by changing the law to make them
| illegal, null, and void?
| charonn0 wrote:
| Cancelation is something that happens to checks, waves, or
| events, but not people or groups of people. You probably
| mean "ostracize", "shun", "repudiate", "boycott", etc.
| amelius wrote:
| What is Eich doing now?
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| https://brave.com/
| bencollier49 wrote:
| Interesting article, but written by Americans it necessarily
| missed another ancestor of the blue hyperlink, Teletext. Given
| that Tim Berners-Lee is English, it's relevant.
| ssdspoimdsjvv wrote:
| Only ~33% of my 27", 1440p display is used for this article,
| which makes the images very unclear unless I zoom in, since they
| don't get their own paragraph and the text wraps around them. Not
| sure if this qualifies as irony for a blog article on UX.
| incanus77 wrote:
| Surprised this doesn't mention visited links turning purple to
| mark that you had been there. I remember coding link, alink
| (active link during click), and vlink attributes.
| SeanLuke wrote:
| In 1990 NeXT released the NeXTstation Color. There are
| screenshots online of WorldWideWeb.app running on the NextStation
| Color, and the hyperlinks are all blue. It's true that Tim
| Berners-Lee wrote WorldWideWeb.app on monochrome NeXT cubes, but
| it seems reasonable that the default underlining he used (in the
| Text object) may have been blue when displayed in color.
|
| Very strange that this article didn't bother to even consider or
| investigate this, simply dismissing the NeXT as monochrome.
|
| See for example:
|
| https://www.w3.org/History/1994/WWW/Journals/CACM/screensnap...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb#/media/File:World...
| a-dub wrote:
| my thoughts exactly! what if you run the original version of
| WorldWideWeb on a color NeXT?
|
| also was somewhat wondering if maybe the blue came from some
| sort of NeXT platform default. (grey #2 renders as blue on
| color machines or somesuch)
| SeanLuke wrote:
| No, gray rendered as gray.
| a-dub wrote:
| didn't the NeXT also have a built-in "digital library"? i
| think it shipped with an encyclopedia. did that have
| hyperlinks? what color were they?
| SeanLuke wrote:
| Didn't work that way. See:
|
| http://www.shawcomputing.net/resources/next/software/bund
| led...
| a-dub wrote:
| well. hrm. my hunch is still that it comes from the next
| (default colors, high visibility colors on b/w and color,
| etc), but maybe not... has anyone actually considered
| just reaching out to tim berners-lee and just asking?
| a-dub wrote:
| it's also pretty amazing when you think about it, what
| the next inspired...
|
| carmack wrote doom on a next, berners-lee wrote the first
| web browser. a beautiful piece of engineering and
| craftsmanship inspired more beautiful pieces of
| engineering and craftsmanship that ultimately changed the
| world.
| js2 wrote:
| Those screenshots are from 1993 ("This is a (242kB) screen shot
| of the browser, taken when things had got to the point that
| Communications of the ACM was interested in an article, in
| 1993."[1]), which matches the year the blog post settled upon
| for when blue links appeared, but that still doesn't answer why
| they are blue.
|
| Can you find a screenshot definitively from before 1993 that
| shows blue hyperlinks?
|
| 1. https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/WorldWideWeb.html
| SeanLuke wrote:
| Nope, can't find any color screenshots earlier than 1993. But
| WorldWideWeb.app would have run just fine on the NextStation
| Color, and NeXT machines elegantly provided a path to color
| from the very beginning, even when in monochrome. I don't
| know if pre-1993 links were gray or blue, but one would have
| thought the author would have bothered to investigate what
| color the links were. My money is on blue. I'll bet Tim could
| say for sure.
|
| EDIT: as of 1991 (the earliest known code), it was still a
| black underline in the code. See line 640 of
|
| https://github.com/cynthia/WorldWideWeb/blob/master/NextStep.
| ..
|
| As of March 1991 he was contemplating providing color
| underlines, see line 61 here:
|
| https://github.com/cynthia/WorldWideWeb/blob/master/NextStep.
| ..
|
| Clearly it changed between 1991 and 1993 but I don't know
| when. Money still on WorldWideWeb.app being the first blue
| link application.
| js2 wrote:
| (Edit: lol, we're investigating in parallel.)
|
| The oldest code I can find is here:
|
| https://browsers.evolt.org/browsers/archive/worldwideweb/Ne
| X...
|
| WWWNextStep_0.15.tar.gz is dated 1993. It's imported here:
|
| https://github.com/cynthia/WorldWideWeb/
|
| Oh, but what is this:
|
| https://github.com/cynthia/WorldWideWeb/blob/master/NextSte
| p...
|
| _26 March 91 version 0.8
|
| Changed anchor highlighting from dark grey to underline,
| now underline is available. (I may make underline &/or
| colour a user preference or style later.)_
|
| So we know that in March of 1991, links were underlined
| with a thought toward color in the future.
|
| And here's the implementation:
|
| https://github.com/cynthia/WorldWideWeb/blob/62b3c9b5082e45
| 5...
|
| Which looks to me like it uses the default text color with
| the option to be changed via style:
|
| https://github.com/cynthia/WorldWideWeb/blob/62b3c9b5082e45
| 5...
| defaulty wrote:
| The story of the blink tag is much more interesting
| rietta wrote:
| Just checked on my Windows 3.1 QEMU image and Help used Green
| hyperlinks still then.
| tudorw wrote:
| blue because it stands out, red means stop, green means go,
| yellow and orange you cannot read.
| js2 wrote:
| According to _Starman_ , yellow means go very fast:
|
| https://youtu.be/g3WtvzmKCQQ
|
| (Starman learns much like ML apparently.)
| xyzzy21 wrote:
| Obviously. Who didn't know this? At least who was alive and using
| the web back then :-)
| hunter2_ wrote:
| > many links, specifically hyperlinks, are blue
|
| What does this superset/subset relationship refer to? I thought
| link was just a shortened word meaning the same as hyperlink.
| tyingq wrote:
| Interesting topic, for sure, but the info on what colors were
| used by "Gopher Protocol" and "Linux Kernel" are pretty silly.
| Those colors would vary by what real or emulated terminal
| somebody was using.
| dkarl wrote:
| I thought that was a nice little touch of humor.
| 5faulker wrote:
| Interesting that the post's coming from a tangerine lover.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| > Another interesting thing about Windows 1.0 that still appears
| in modern websites is the underlined hyperlink. This is the first
| example of an underline being used to indicate a hyperlink that I
| have been able to find.
|
| I'm confused, what in Windows 1.0 is, or is being called, a
| "hyperlink" that's underlined? Is it shown in the screenshots? I
| wouldn't have expected there would be such thing as a "hyperlink"
| in Windows 1.0, and am not sure what the author is referring to.
| ectopod wrote:
| It's the window with the caption "Microsoft Help". (And it's
| actually Windows 2, not 1 as the article claims.) A help file
| was a bunch of hyperlinked rich-text documents in a single
| file. The hyperlinks could even span help files, though I don't
| know which Windows version introduced that.
|
| (Edited for tone.)
| m0rti wrote:
| It is similar to why we chose gold to use as "gold" as humanity.
| Not all elements are suitable to be used as a store of value and
| physical currency.
|
| Let's look at the primary and secondary colours.
|
| Yellow: Bad contrast. Red or Green: Action colours, would be bad
| to see them everywhere. Plus there might be accessibility
| concerns. Orange: Mostly used as "Not as urgent as red". Purple:
| Not as neutral as blue, yet it is the second best option, that's
| why visited hyperlinks are purple I assume. It is the logical
| choice.
|
| We are left with the colour blue. Also, a plus that it is a
| primary colour; I would assume it is easier to display primary
| colours in earlier tech.
| 101008 wrote:
| I miss blue for links and purple for visited links. I think
| Google still does it (which is great for the nostalgic of the
| webs), but today links are mostly buttons/images and not text
| anymore.
|
| I remember also, in the 90s, was quite popular yellow text
| against a black/dark blue background. The old days!
| timw4mail wrote:
| The fact that the :visited state of links was gimped due to
| privacy issues doesn't help much either.
|
| It used to be any visited link would look visited, regardless
| of the website. This made it possible to see where a user had
| visited across the web, and so visited links only apply to the
| current origin now.
|
| At some point it also became hip to remove the underline from
| links, and links rarely have underlines anymore.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Any deets on the privacy aspect?
|
| I'm assuming a JS query can check link status and colour?
| With a targeted or crafted link-of-interest, user activity
| might then be tracked, yes?
| BenjiWiebe wrote:
| Right.
| quartz wrote:
| I'm curious what Lynx, which is curiously absent from this piece,
| did with hyperlinks since it was released in '92 I think?
| layer8 wrote:
| The simplest explanation is that blue is the darkest of the
| primary colors (at full intensity, think 8/16-color palette) and
| hence has the best contrast on white or gray background (after
| black). It also helps that it isn't a signalling color like red
| (important/error) and green (good/go).
| JonathonW wrote:
| Given the author's "conclusions" about Windows's influence here,
| it's probably worth mentioning that Windows 3.x (including both
| 3.0 and 3.1) used green for hyperlinks in its help system by
| default (which was hypertext but not HTML):
| https://i.imgur.com/ZjX5xIW.png
|
| Green hyperlinks stuck around in the Windows 95 help system, and
| were eventually replaced when Windows 98 switched to Microsoft's
| new HTML Help system which defaulted to blue hyperlinks
| (inherited from Internet Explorer).
| sgarrity wrote:
| I always assumed that the green help links color was
| intentionally differentiated from regular blue web links to
| clearly imply that they remain within the "Help" universe.
|
| The timeline might undermine my assumption.
| JonathonW wrote:
| I don't think the timeframe's right for that-- were there
| ever even any web browsers that ran on Windows 3.0?
|
| At any rate, there wouldn't be any need to distinguish
| internal help links from web links, because neither Windows
| 3.0 nor 3.1 ever shipped with a web browser-- can't link out
| in your docs if the tools aren't available to follow the
| links. Early versions of Windows 95 didn't, either, with IE
| 2.0 being bundled with the OS for the first time with OSR1.
| timClicks wrote:
| I might be remembering this incorrectly, but I don't think
| that Windows 3.0 even had support for TCP/IP networking by
| default.
| JonathonW wrote:
| Nor did 3.1. Windows for Workgroups 3.11 did eventually
| get a first-party TCP/IP stack from Microsoft (as an add-
| on), but TCP/IP was largely the domain of third-party
| products up until Windows 95.
| slingnow wrote:
| It's likely this person came across this during their research,
| but decided to omit it because it didn't fit in with their
| already weak and speculative narrative.
| basch wrote:
| Are those dates right? WWW in 1987? That's like 3 years earlier
| than I thought it was.
| rickstanley wrote:
| It was released in December 1990. As pointed out by
| billyhoffman in the comments, there are some factual errors.
| basch wrote:
| I saw that after the page reloaded. When you load a page and
| somebody comments, it doesnt inline load.
| jacquesm wrote:
| No.
| sysadm1n wrote:
| I find myself touching any piece of text that is blue, for
| example an AD in my local newspaper that has some text in blue.
| This is due to an ingrained pattern of behavior and the result of
| being _decades_ on the web.
|
| In the future when augmented reality becomes the norm, it could
| be possible that clicking this blue link actually brings up a
| webpage, either on my phone, or broadcasted into my retina.
|
| QR codes just don't cut it.
| onion2k wrote:
| Mosaic was the first browser I used, and the first I wrote
| websites for (I still only test in one browser ;) ).
|
| Something the article doesn't touch on is the fact that there
| wasn't really such a thing as hex colors like "#0000ff" back
| then. You could use them, but no one did because they weren't
| guaranteed to work properly. There was a list of 256 "web safe
| colors" that you could use that were the 8 bit palette that most
| computers supported in VGA graphics (at 640x480 resolution), and
| then a further list of HTML colors that could be used if the user
| had a graphics card that could use 16 bit SVGA graphics. Using 24
| bit hex code colors didn't come along until a little later, when
| computers were likely to display them properly.
|
| In other words, links weren't #0000ff. They were "blue".
| bitwize wrote:
| Yes, people did use the hex codes back then. You just had to
| take care that the ones you used were on the list of 216 (not
| 256) web safe colors. The VGA palette was programmable and
| supported up to 262,144 colors, but a standard set of 216 was
| used in browsers to allow Windows, Mac OS, and other programs
| color table slots with which to draw their standard colors.
|
| I think some browsers understood X11 color names like "blue" or
| "DarkSlateGray", but there are more than 216 of those, so same
| caveat applies.
| geophile wrote:
| The ASCII color codes for a terminal are in a 6x6x6 space.
| That's 216. Does that explain the number of web-safe colors?
| bitwize wrote:
| The same space is used for the web colors, but I don't know
| if there's a causal connection there.
| duskwuff wrote:
| No. 256-color mode wasn't added to XTerm until July 1999:
|
| https://invisible-island.net/xterm/xterm.log.html#xterm_111
| tyingq wrote:
| >some browsers understood X11 color names
|
| This still exists in some weird places. For example, I have a
| Hue portable light that connects to Alexa and can change
| colors. But I can only tell it X11 color names...it doesn't
| understand anything else. Which is funny given that both
| devices are fairly modern.
| recursive wrote:
| It was actually only 216 web safe colors.
|
| You could use names, or you could use colors whose RGB
| components were each multiples of 0x33. (00, 33, 66, 99, cc,
| ff)
| DonHopkins wrote:
| 216 = 6 * 6 * 6 -- That's a "Color Cube": a 6x6x6 3D cube of
| 216 equally spaced colors. Not necessarily the colors you'd
| actually want, though, just mathematically convenient.
| Figuring out the closest color in the cube to any color is
| quick and easy (so you can do a quick 24=>8 error diffusion
| dither, for example, which needs to do that every pixel), but
| lots of the colors suck.
|
| Web-Safe Colors (a Color Cube)
|
| https://www.peachpit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=23671&seqNu.
| ..
|
| Not to be confused with a Time Cube.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Cube
| itomato wrote:
| Specifically, "blue3":
|
| "anchorColor: color Color to shade anchors whose corresponding
| documents haven't been previously visited. Default is blue3.
|
| visitedAnchorColor: color Color to shade anchors whose
| corresponding documents have been previously visited. Default
| is violetred4."
|
| https://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe/support/html/Docs/resources...
| reaperducer wrote:
| _the 8 bit palette that most computers supported in VGA
| graphics_
|
| There were plenty of us who surfed the web in less than VGA. I
| was on monochrome.
|
| OS/2 Warp had a web browser and supported CGA:
| https://www.mit.edu/activities/os2/faq/os2faq0201.html
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| Around that time I brought a magazine to the web as a paid job
| and had endless discussions about the fact that the colors were
| "not accurate" and "not following CI".
| kstrauser wrote:
| I remember those days! Cue a design editor holding Pantone
| cards up to the screen and scowling.
|
| That also led to interesting things like websites telling you
| how to calibrate your monitor so that they'd render
| correctly, e.g. http://sasg.com/help.html .
| irrational wrote:
| I always used the hex codes for the web safe colors. I've been
| building web pages for 25+ years and I've never used color
| names.
| jandrese wrote:
| One underappreciated aspect of paletted computers is that you
| couldn't just take the whole palette for yourself, you have to
| leave some colors for the OS and for the other applications
| running alongside you. Palette management gets really
| complicated when you have multiple applications trying to share
| one. Even though it takes three times as much video memory, you
| save considerable complexity when you go true color.
| kbelder wrote:
| Yeah, it really was a hindrance to multitasking. Your palette
| would sometimes reshuffle as you switched applications,
| making it seem like your screen was about to explode.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Ben Shneiderman developed "TIES" aka "HyperTIES" at the
| University of Maryland Human Computer Interaction Lab, and here's
| what he recently wrote in response to a question about
| hyperlinks, in which he mentioned the origin of blue as a
| highlighting color.
|
| Also here's a link to an article about the NeWS version of
| HyperTIES that we developed at HCIL, and some demos of HyperTIES
| and its Emacs based authoring tool, which had pie menus and
| embedded interactive PostScript "applets" in 1988.
|
| https://medium.com/@donhopkins/designing-to-facilitate-brows...
|
| HCIL Demo - HyperTIES Browsing
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZi4gUjaGAM&ab_channel=DonHo...
|
| HCIL Demo - HyperTIES Authoring with UniPress Emacs on NeWS
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hhmU2B79EDU&ab_channel=DonHo...
|
| Don Hopkins and pie menus in ~ Spring 1989 on a Sun Workstation,
| running the NEWS operating system.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Fne3j7cWzg&ab_channel=Cathe...
|
| John Gilmore via Internet-history <internet-
| history@elists.isoc.org> Date: Mon, Apr 13, 2020, 11:56 PM To:
| Brian, internet-history, Jeff
|
| I forwarded this question to my friend Don Hopkins, who was a
| student of Ben Shneiderman back in the day. Ben ultimately
| responded:
|
| From: Ben Shneiderman <ben@cs.umd.edu> To: Don Hopkins
| <don@donhopkins.com> CC: John Gilmore <gnu@toad.com>, Ben
| Shneiderman <ben@cs.umd.edu> Subject: RE: [ih] origins of the
| term "hyperlink" Date: Mon, 13 Apr 2020 15:15:52 +0000
|
| HI Don (and Jack Gilmore),
|
| Thanks for including me in this conversation.
|
| I do not have a claim for the term "hyperlinks" and don't know
| when it came into use. My claim is for the visual interface for
| showing highlighted selectable links embedded in paragraphs. This
| is what we called embedded menu items in that I think is an
| influential paper on the topic, which was peer-reviewed and
| published in the CACM in April 1986.
|
| https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/5684.5687
|
| http://www.cs.umd.edu/~ben/papers/Koved1986Embedded.pdf
|
| While Engelbart had shown a list that could be selected by
| pointing and clicking in 1968, I claim the idea of embedded
| highlighted selectable text in paragraphs. This was implemented
| by grad student Daniel Ostroff and described in:
|
| Ewing J, Mehrabanzad S, Sheck S, Ostroff D and Shneiderman B
| (1986), "An experimental comparison of a mouse and arrow-jump
| keys for an interactive encyclopedia", International Journal of
| Man-Machine Studies, Jan., 1986, Vol 24, pp. 29-45.
|
| [Abstract] [BibTeX] [DOI]
|
| Ostroff D and Shneiderman B (1988), "Selection devices for users
| of an electronic encyclopedia: an empirical comparison of four
| possibilities", Information Processing and Management, Nov.,
| 1988, Vol 24(6), pp. 665-680.
|
| [Abstract] [BibTeX] [DOI]
|
| I think the 1988 paper was the earlier study, but the publication
| took a while.
|
| My students conducted more than a dozen experiments (unpublished)
| on different ways of highlighting and selection using current
| screens, e.g. green screens only permitted, bold, underscore,
| blinking, and I think italic(???). When we had a color screen we
| tried different color highlighted links. While red made the links
| easier to spot, user comprehension and recollection of the
| content declined. We chose the light blue, which Tim adopted.
|
| His systems with embedded menus (or hot spots), where a
| significant user interface improvement over early systems such as
| Gopher. But Tim told me at the time that he was influenced by our
| design as he saw it in the Hypertext on Hypertext project that we
| used Hyperties to build for the July 1988 CACM that held the
| articles from the July 1987 Hypertext conference at the
| University of North Carolina. The ACM sold 4000 copies of our
| Hypertext on Hypertext disks.
|
| Our history is here:
|
| https://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/hyperties/
|
| and the video is very helpful in showing the design we used,
| which is what I think Tim built on for his WWW prototypes.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29b4O2xxeqg
|
| So in summary, I don't know who coined hypertext, but I do think
| our work visual and interaction design was influential.
|
| Our Hyperties system was picked up by Cognetics Corporation
| (around 1987) who made a modestly successful commercial run with
| it, doing dozens of corporate projects, most notably the Hewlett-
| Packard user manual for their Laserjet 4 was distributed as a
| Hyperties disk.
|
| Hyperties was the name we shifted to after we got a stop and
| desist order from a lawyer because our TIES (The Interactive
| Encyclopedia System) conflicted with an existing product. By then
| "hyper" was a growing term.
|
| Let me know if this helps, and what other questions you have....
| Ben
| 58x14 wrote:
| More relevant details here than the entire Mozilla article.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Here's your answers, people.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| this is a really long clickbait-y/listicle type article that I
| wouldn't have expected to be on mozilla. Despite it's "deep dive"
| it barely answers it's own question and just beats around random
| browser/computing history like we can't see that anywhere else?
| Weak.
| LorenPechtel wrote:
| They're blue because they're sad you're leaving their website! :)
| sedatk wrote:
| TL;DR: Mosaic 0.13 introduced the blue links because it had to
| distinguish visited and unvisited links. Just paraphrasing
| article here, not sure about it's accuracy since many have
| pointed out its inaccuracies.
| karmakaze wrote:
| Also worth mentioning that WinHelp (the F1 documentation pages)
| used green underlined text for links in some places (e.g. list of
| referred topics).
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Given that numerous early Web clients were text-based (especially
| www and lynx), there's the question of what colours were
| available on a (possibly) colour-capable display, or a colour-
| aware terminal emulator.
|
| These would have been provided through ANSI escape sequences,
| which allowed for white, black, red, green, blue, yellow,
| magenta, and cyan.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code
|
| With a bright background (white), blue is the most clearly-
| visible non-black colour, and avoids R-G colourblindness issues.
| On a _dark_ background (black), cyan is light enough to be
| readable, but not as glaringly distracting as either red or
| yellow.
|
| Given the prevalence of green and amber phosphor displays, and
| some adoption of that colour scheme for terminal colours, yellow
| and green might have been avoided due to conflicts with standard
| text.
|
| The next question is when colour support was added to terminals.
| I'm confident that xterm could have foreground/background colours
| specified by 1997. Support for 16 colours didn't hit xterm until
| 1996:
|
| https://invisible-island.net/xterm/xterm.log.html#xterm_39
|
| rxvt may have had colour support earlier. I'm unsure of dates or
| changelogs though it's mentioned in print as of 1994:
| https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_X_Resource/RKhFAQAA...
| gumby wrote:
| Apparently the author has never used a monochrome interface if
| they think gopher is "green" and Linux (which has nothing to do
| with hyperlinks either) is "white"
| thibran wrote:
| I would love if links to the same domain would have another
| color, so that you know if e.g. a news site just links to own
| content or the source, without clicking all the links in the
| articel.
| rhplus wrote:
| Quick answer: "Because blue is neither red nor green".
| amelius wrote:
| On HN they are not ...
| mattl wrote:
| HyperTIES in 1988 had blue hyperlinks.
| http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/hyperties/
| billyhoffman wrote:
| I'm a little surprised by some basic facts the article gets
| wrong.
|
| - WorldWideWeb was not created in 1987. Tim Berners-Lee released
| it in December 1990, based on a proposal he developed in 1989
| [1].
|
| - Windows 1.0 in 1985 did not have hyperlinks. It also did not
| have overlapping windows. [2] That second screenshot is of
| Windows 2, (from December 1987) showing the "Help" system, which
| did use underlined hyperlinks, from 1989.
|
| It makes me question the thoroughness of their research at all.
|
| > What happened in 1993 to suddenly make hyperlinks blue? No one
| knows, but I have some theories. ... I like to imagine that Cello
| and Mosaic were both inspired by the same trends happening in
| user interface design at the time. My theory is that Windows 3.1
| had just come out.
|
| What? No! These are grad students working at the National Center
| for Supercomputing Applications in the 1990s on big powerful Unix
| workstations [3]. I highly doubt the UI choices of Window 3 were
| relevant or closely watched by that team.
|
| 1- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim_Berners-
| Lee#Career_and_res...
|
| 2- https://www.filfre.net/2018/07/doing-windows-
| part-3-a-pair-o...
|
| 3- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(web_browser)#History
| purge wrote:
| The second screenshot is from windows 2, which was released in
| 1987
| billyhoffman wrote:
| Ahhh! Good catchup. I thought those "minimize" and "maximize"
| icons looked odd. Updated
| deathanatos wrote:
| I also disagreed with,
|
| > _Here Microsoft uses the "hyperlink blue" for active states
| when a user clicks on different drives, folders and icons._
|
| Hyperlink blue was a much brighter blue (pure blue, on the
| interfaces I used, but I was a litter later in the timeline)
| than Window's blue, which was a (noticeably) darker blue.
| sumtechguy wrote:
| Yeah, if I were to 'pick' a reason it would be that it worked
| in the EGA colorspace. You did not exactly get a huge range
| of colors there. While in 1993 256 (small screen res) or
| 'truecolor' (very expensive vid card) was not unheard of but
| it was decently uncommon on low end hardware.
| duskwuff wrote:
| They're also pretty seriously wrong about HyperCard:
|
| > Apple brought color to its HyperCards, but notably, the text
| links were still black and not blue.
|
| HyperCard never natively supported any form of "text links".
| You could make a button with a text label, or a transparent
| button hovering over text, but there was no way to attach a
| behavior to a span of styled text without a lot of custom
| scripting.
|
| (And, for what it's worth, the color XCMD for HyperCard never
| really caught on. It was a late addition, and never felt
| entirely like a native part of the application. Even when it
| was available, most users kept on authoring stacks in black and
| white.)
|
| > However, some UI elements did have blue accents when
| interacted upon
|
| I have no idea what the author is referring to here. Possibly
| the blue tint in the system UI (like window titlebars), which
| has nothing to do with HyperCard and didn't apply to its in-app
| UI?
| II2II wrote:
| > I have no idea what the author is referring to here.
| Possibly the blue tint in the system UI (like window
| titlebars)
|
| I get the impression that the author was trying to answer two
| questions, the second being: where did the color blue come
| from?
|
| I was also under the impression that the color XCMD was not a
| part of HyperCard and was created by a third party, but I
| could be wrong there since it has been over 20 years since
| I've used HyperCard.
| duskwuff wrote:
| There were a couple of different color solutions for
| HyperCard, but the official one (Color Tools) was released
| with HyperCard 2.3.
|
| The window tint in System 7 was a user preference. The
| purplish blue seen in the screenshot was the default color,
| but there were about a dozen other options. In any event,
| it seems a stretch to assume that Apple's choice of this
| color influenced Mosaic in choosing a different blue color
| for a different purpose.
| pdw wrote:
| For all their talking about early Windows versions, they missed
| that Windows 3 introduced a hypertext help system. It used
| green links.
|
| This is what it looked like:
| http://toastytech.com/guis/win30help.png
| fsiefken wrote:
| Ah that's probably why the color green is also in the
| EDIT.COM hypertext arrow links in the MSDOS 5.0 Help menu in
| 1991.
| kbelder wrote:
| Windows help functionality has been declining ever since.
| Those old help files were so clean and snappy, well-organized
| and searchable. Now, I dread accidently pressing F1 in any
| major windows app.
| pedroma wrote:
| That's a nice looking color.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| I guffawed at "I do not believe that this is the first
| instance of the blue hyperlink since this color is cyan, and
| not dark blue."
|
| No Blue Scotsman!
|
| Tim Berners-Lee told Ben Shneiderman at the time that he was
| influenced by the design of the HyperTIES-based "Hypertext on
| Hypertext" project from the 1987 HyperText conference that
| the ACM published, which had light blue links.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28317104
|
| >My students conducted more than a dozen experiments
| (unpublished) on different ways of highlighting and selection
| using current screens, e.g. green screens only permitted,
| bold, underscore, blinking, and I think italic(???). When we
| had a color screen we tried different color highlighted
| links. While red made the links easier to spot, user
| comprehension and recollection of the content declined. We
| chose the light blue, which Tim adopted.
|
| >His systems with embedded menus (or hot spots), where a
| significant user interface improvement over early systems
| such as Gopher. But Tim told me at the time that he was
| influenced by our design as he saw it in the Hypertext on
| Hypertext project that we used Hyperties to build for the
| July 1988 CACM that held the articles from the July 1987
| Hypertext conference at the University of North Carolina. The
| ACM sold 4000 copies of our Hypertext on Hypertext disks.
| Stratoscope wrote:
| > _Windows 1.0 in 1985 did not have...overlapping windows._
|
| Actually Windows 1.0 _did_ have overlapping windows.
|
| They just weren't the default style for application windows.
|
| But there were popup windows that overlapped other windows on
| the screen. These were typically used for dialog and message
| boxes, for example the End Session message box midway through
| that filfre.net article.
|
| There was nothing stopping anyone from using a popup-style
| window for their application, and adding a titlebar so you
| could move it around on the screen. It just wasn't the custom,
| and people would think your app was weird if it did that. And
| on a typical system of the day (no GPU!), dragging your window
| around on the screen would perform rather poorly.
| billyhoffman wrote:
| Great catch!
|
| I had read that Digital Antiquarian piece a few months back
| and had remembered about the "sub windows" that an app could
| have. But I had thought they were scoped to just be on top of
| the window for the app that spawned it, and couldn't leave
| that "tile."
|
| However, you are totally right. This image right here clearly
| shows it overlapping another application's tiled window.
|
| https://www.filfre.net/2018/07/doing-windows-
| part-3-a-pair-o...
|
| This is the best kind of correct: technically correct!
| dbt00 wrote:
| I'm quite sure that students, even grad students, at UIUC, had
| lots of access to windows based computers in 1993. Just because
| they weren't doing their work on them didn't mean they didn't
| have PCs running DOS or Windows (and maybe dual booting Linux).
| dotancohen wrote:
| They were most certainly not dual booting Linux in 1993.
| ska wrote:
| > They were most certainly not dual booting Linux in 1993.
|
| This just isn't true.
| tingletech wrote:
| I'm pretty sure we were dual booting linux in 1993, why
| were we certainly not?
| ricardobeat wrote:
| I think you could barely fit one OS in your 64MB hard
| drive at the time...
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Windows 3.11 required 14 MB HD space.
|
| https://www.technologytips.com/windows-system-
| requirements/
|
| At 64 MB, you wouldn't have a whole lot of space for data
| and applications / utilities, but you could certainly
| cram a couple of OSes on it.
|
| The first "user-installable" linux was arguably SLS,
| which came on 24 1.5 MB floppies. I'm unsure what the
| installed size was, but likely in the 24 -- 48 MB range.
|
| https://opensource.com/article/18/8/first-linux-install
| [deleted]
| Kye wrote:
| Windows 3.11 (1993) was ~15MB once installed.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| 250MB was common by then and Linux distros only took up a
| dozenish MB. Lilo existed by then and everyone dual
| booted to DOS/Win3. If you didn't want to modify the MBR
| you could boot Linux from DOS with loadlin.exe.
| bluedino wrote:
| Computers came in towers back then which could contain
| many hard drives
| smhenderson wrote:
| 1993 is roughly when I bought my first computer and it
| came with 120 MB HD. I dual booted Linux (Slackware) on
| it in 1995. Still on Win 3.11 though, I believe I bought
| a bigger hard drive before upgrading to Windows 95, but
| still dual booting with Linux on another partition.
|
| You could fit a lot more OS on an HD in 1993 than you can
| now!
| fsiefken wrote:
| Not in my university, i had a used toshiba 386sx25Mhz as
| a laptop with Windows 3.11. The fastest public desktop
| computer was a 486DX2 running at 66Mhz, around 6 of them
| on the 4th floor from the physics faculty, that was early
| 1994. It was running Mosaic and Netscape 0.9 or so with
| Win 3.11, no dual boot. When I got my own room and built
| myself a 486DX5@133 Mhz I got RedHat linux on it, dual
| booting, I think it was '95. My roommate had a pentium
| with Windows98SE running Moria, he was quite addicted to
| it. Perhaps some very adventurous types were trying out
| Linux on their own machines in 1993 but distributions
| were all pretty new, I am not sure it was written about
| in Byte or C'T magazine in 1993. Perhaps it was discussed
| on mailinglists or usenet groups, but it was not really
| findable on the www I think. I frequented a site called
| 'on the bleeding edge' featuring a picture of a knife (or
| so I remember) and a list of kernel version numbers and
| patches. Not sure what date, but might have been '95.
|
| I remember downloading and compiling kernel 1.1 or 1.2 -
| which were released in 1994. In 1995 I bought the offical
| RedHat CD's, I might have tried Slackware or Debian
| floppy disks earlier. A friend was running Linux with
| X-Windows, Emacs and Mosaic on his Pentium with
| WindowMaker or AfterStep. No dual-boot. He was on usenet
| (with the built-in netscape usenet reader) and played
| with Lisp, he had studied physics (or was it philosophy)
| at the Utrecht University. Heaps of Byte and Astronomy
| magazines and SF books littered in his room where he
| enjoyed a glass of wine and a cigar. I occasionally
| dropped by for a chat about linux, SF, astronomy and the
| meaning of life and my own troubles. I think he had
| dropped out of college for some reason years ago but I
| never dared asking why. He was brilliant and stayed in
| the student dorm as a senior. Unfortunately at 45 or so
| he died in his sleep I heard later when I wasn't living
| there anymore. He had a good job at the municipality and
| was well respected for his knowledge, seriousness, dry
| and dark humor and wit and was still living in the
| student dorm.
| rahoulb wrote:
| I don't know about UIUC, but I was at university in the UK in
| 1993.
|
| We had "labs" with about 30 Windows/DOS PCs in them that were
| for general use (meaning word-processing). Probably 1 in 100
| students had their own computer (and if so it was more likely
| to be an Amiga or Atari ST).
|
| My course wasn't computer-related, but I took a few computer-
| based modules (graphics, vision, AI, intro to programming).
| All of these apart from intro to programming where done on
| university SunOS/Solaris or Irix machines (and Intro to
| Programming was in Turbo Pascal for DOS on those Windows
| machines).
|
| The SGI Irix machines (made famous in the original Jurassic
| Park) were really nice.
| arc-in-space wrote:
| This article is poorly written, I was expecting an interesting
| investigation but stopped reading halfway through. Here's a
| bunch of underdescribed things with non-blue hyperlinks, and
| some completely unrelated ones that didn't even have
| hyperlinks. The answer to the headline could have been made in
| one sentence and there would have been no loss of value.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Well, it _does_ follow the Best Practices for Getting the
| Right Answer on the Internet protocol.
|
| (a/k/a Cunningham's Law)
| addingnumbers wrote:
| > The answer to the headline could have been made in one
| sentence and there would have been no loss of value.
|
| That sentence would be "I have literally no idea, it seems
| completely arbitrary." There really isn't any value worth
| preserving, it's just misinformed commentary on a bunch of
| screenshots taken while the author was probably in diapers.
| setpatchaddress wrote:
| " Gopher Protocol was created at the University of Minnesota
| for searching and retrieving documents. Its original design
| featured green text on a black background."
|
| Yeah. All you need to know about this article.
| city41 wrote:
| I also found noting the Linux kernel's color schemes as
| rather odd.
| fsiefken wrote:
| Yes, now that you mention it. MS-DOS 5.0 (which predated
| the first Linux release a few months in 1991) had a nice
| grey text on blue background for EDIT.COM (or was it exe?)
| and QBASIC.EXE. and NC.EXE (Norton Commander). Netscape and
| Mosaic inverted this color scheme with a grey background
| and blue hyperlinked text. COINCIDENCE? PERHAPS NOT!
|
| I grew up with MS-DOS and 4M of RAM, perhaps I should make
| a tiny VM with Windows 3.11 and Netscape to revisit these
| days and try to get my Jekyll blog running on it (served
| from CERN httpd or the popular webserver at the time). Not
| sure if VirtualBox virtual network adapter can be
| recognized by Windows 3.11. Perhaps someone can backport a
| Gemini browser to Windows 3.11.. perhaps someone can
| backport a modern WWW browser to Windows 3.11!
|
| edit: someone provided VM's already! Just 33M for
| DOS622+WIN311 (but still a lot of floppies). I disabled the
| default USB support and the startup to GUI is ~5s. EDIT.COM
| has a "hypertext" links in it consisting of 2 little green
| arrows, 1 triangle rotated left on the left side and 1
| right on the right side. The grey on black text is not
| underlined.
| http://virtualdiskimages.weebly.com/virtualbox.html
| cpach wrote:
| Same here, considering that there were lots of prior art
| for white text on black background.
| nsxwolf wrote:
| Gosh I could have sworn I remember it being amber text on a
| black background.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| The VTs I've used on VMS were amber.
| anonymousiam wrote:
| Probably a VT220. IIRC those had amber screen phosphor.
| The VT100 had white.
| daveslash wrote:
| Yeah, I _think_ the point that @setpatchaddress was trying
| to make was that the author is confusing the color of the
| monitor itself with the color prescribed by the software.
| Thus, take the accuracy of the entire article with a big
| grain of salt. That 's how I understood the comment....
|
| Monochrome monitors were often _either_ green _or_ amber
| _or_ white. If the monitor used P1 Phosphor, then it was
| green, P3 Phosphor was amber, and P4 Phosphor was white. So
| the color of the text on the screen was a reflection of the
| hardware spec /design, not of the software.
| timw4mail wrote:
| So what color was P2 Phosphor?
| Andrew_nenakhov wrote:
| Blue-green.
|
| Check standard phosphor types section here:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphor
| daveslash wrote:
| My first response was -\\_(tsu)_/- -- but I dug some more
| and found out that P2 is a Blue-Green color used in
| oscilloscopes, but it doesn't look like monochrome
| computer monitors were ever made for it though [1].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphor#Standard_phosp
| hor_typ...
| duskwuff wrote:
| P2 was a long persistence phosphor. It was used in analog
| oscilloscopes because those couldn't be refreshed -- the
| waveform was drawn onto the display as it was received,
| and the phosphor was responsible for making that visible.
|
| You wouldn't want that in a computer monitor. The
| computer is perfectly capable of refreshing the monitor,
| and the long duration of the phosphor would make anything
| rapidly changing (like a scrolling display) impossible to
| read because all of the previous contents would interfere
| with the current image.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| Storage tube monitors did use long persistence phosphors.
| They were a way to simplify the refresh and memory
| requirements on early hardware.
| akiselev wrote:
| Blue-green. It was used mostly only in oscilloscopes [1]
| because the persistence time was really long - good for
| instruments where the signal might be changing faster
| than a human can perceive not so much for low latency
| inputs.
|
| [1] https://www.wellenkino.de/565/565-1.jpg
| kbelder wrote:
| And Asteroids arcade machines, I believe.
| dhosek wrote:
| There were also monochrome flat-panel displays, either
| LCD or plasma. My first1 computer was a 25Mhz 386
| lunchbox luggable with a plasma (amber) display. It was
| portable-ish and ran on AC power only.
|
| ---
|
| 1. Well really my second. The first was a Spectravideo
| computer I got for writing demo programs for the midwest
| distributor when I was in high school. It wasn't very
| useful though.
| bluedino wrote:
| How did you end up with that for a first computer?
| CydeWeys wrote:
| Something similar was the first computer I used too. My
| answer would.be: My dad bought it. This was a common form
| factor for personal computers back then, and they were
| sold in stores to to the general public.
| [deleted]
| setpatchaddress wrote:
| Indeed, apologies for being terse. I suspect @nsxwolf
| understood that, though.
| daveslash wrote:
| Re>> _" I suspect @nsxwolf understood that, though."_
|
| You're probably right. I still struggle with tone
| sometimes. I'm still getting used to this whole _"
| Internet"_ thing... ;-)
| BulgarianIdiot wrote:
| And while we're on the topic.
|
| Why the hell were our monochrome displays not all white.
| What's the purpose of adding a color.
| tyingq wrote:
| Green phosphor coating was cheaper and had a longer
| "glow" time so it worked better on lower refresh rate
| equipment. Why they weren't all white later, once that
| all mattered less, is a good question. I do know that HP
| charged us more for the white ones...that never changed.
| michaelcampbell wrote:
| I was "that guy" during those days and insisted on buying a
| monochrome CRT (which at that time was just a CRT, since
| your only choice WAS which "chrome" you chose for your
| monochrome) whose text was kind of pastel white. It was
| glorious.
| zabatuvajdka wrote:
| I think the article is more of a musing than a mathematical
| proof...
|
| I mean who has the time to deep dive into 100% historical
| accuracy of these things.
|
| I thought it was a neat look at a historical context of
| something mundane like a hyperlink.
| Hublium wrote:
| The whole thing felt like "intern from high school searches
| for 'old computer screenshots' with Google Image Search and
| comment on what they found".
| zabatuvajdka wrote:
| Hence the musing... when you muse about something you
| want to keep it loose exploration no?
| allturtles wrote:
| No one has time to bother caring about the past, and we
| should be grateful that someone half-assed it (at best)?
|
| I strongly disagree with this premise, there are plenty of
| people out there taking the past seriously and "full-
| assing" it.
| zabatuvajdka wrote:
| I'm not trivializing history just calling out all the
| pundits who armchair complain about people's good-natured
| blog posts.
| dystroy wrote:
| So, is there somebody there who knows Marc Andreessen or Eric
| Bina and could aks one of them to confirm they choose blue
| because it looked good on white while red or green were obviously
| too much loaded ?
|
| This looks simpler than listing a bunch of other UI, many non
| influential and none of them giving the answer.
| pgroves wrote:
| My boss did UI/UX on Mosaic (we are both at NCSA today). I will
| ask her on Tuesday when I see her. She has lots of wild stories
| about why things are the way they are.
| jccalhoun wrote:
| Agreed. I'm kind of shocked that the author didn't just ask
| people who were on the mosaic team.
| Veen wrote:
| Perhaps I'm being unfair, but that's what a journalist would
| do, not a UI designer writing what is essentially a piece of
| content marketing.
| vitaflo wrote:
| > they choose blue because it looked good on white
|
| Websites back then did not have white backgrounds, they were
| all gray. In fact I've always wondered why the default
| background was gray more than why the links were blue.
| pornel wrote:
| Because window backgrounds were gray in NeXT, because buttons
| used both white and black to create beveled "3d" borders,
| because beveled buttons were a fancy upgrade compared to
| simple borders in 1-bit graphics. Screen resolutions and
| drawing speed weren't good enough to waste on thicker
| borders, so 1px lines had to stand out on their own.
| Stratoscope wrote:
| Back then, most people used CRT displays, and just like
| today, tended to have the brightness turned up too high. And
| it was fairly common to have a 30 Hz refresh rate. The
| refresh might even be interlaced!
|
| A white background in this situation could lead to noticeable
| flicker, especially as you moved your eyes, e.g. look away
| from the monitor and look back at it.
|
| The gray background made this flicker less noticeable.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refresh_rate
| davesque wrote:
| I remember when a friend of mine in middle school fired up the
| first version of Mosaic on his mac. I could hardly even tell what
| the point of the application (as they used to be called) was. He
| was also really into hypercard. We actually did a school project
| together in hypercard. I had really no idea at the time that such
| technologies would become so widespread and important. They
| initially seemed really arbitrary.
| masswerk wrote:
| My two cents: I think, it's mostly due to grey background color,
| text contrast and CRT rendering.
|
| In reverse order:
|
| * Not all colors lent themselves equally well to a CRT,
| especially to the more cost effective ones. Green, esp. when in
| multiple shades, didn't render well (or, the other way round,
| issues with green are more easily detected by the human eye), so
| you won't see much green in early color UIs (or rather bright
| single-color expressions in elements like bars).
|
| * Also, CRT specific, you want to stick with primary colors
| (RGB), since even a small misalignment of the cathodes will
| result in blurry text in more evenly distributed hues. (Same is
| true for the outer regions of larger color CRTs with shadow
| masks.)
|
| * Monitor calibration wasn't always the best, shades of grey
| often exhibited a red hue, esp. on systems with a gamma of 2.0.
|
| * Considering what we have established, we are searching for a
| color which consists mostly of R, G, or B and renders well on an
| average color CRT on top of a grey background of #C0C0C0. (Also,
| mind that in 1993/4, we're probably not speaking of millions of
| colors to choose from, but rather more of a 4-bit color palette,
| if we're looking for robustness.)
|
| - Green, as already established, is somewhat complicated. Also, a
| mostly green color of comparable intensity is perceived somewhat
| brighter than, say a blue one. It will stand out against black
| text, probably more than you want, and it's contrast ratio to a
| light grey suffering from a red tint isn't great.
|
| - Red may not be the best choice either, as its contrast to grey
| isn't the best (ask your printer) - and its use may be best
| reserved for representing an active state. (There's also the
| cultural issue with red usually signifying limits or even off-
| limit areas, which isn't especially inviting.)
|
| - Which leaves blue for a passive state, which is actually a good
| choice. It's perceived slightly darker than the other primary
| colors, which is favorable for rendering text, it has a good
| contrast against light grey, and isn't affected by any
| missalignments or color calibration issues (as it doesn't share
| with red), and, while visible, isn't too distracting in what is
| mostly black text (you still want to provide for fluent reading
| of a given text, even, if it embeds a link). Moreover, it is more
| friendly to impaired vision than green or red (which are actually
| used in diagnosing defective vision). Properties, for which it
| had been used as a favorite color in UIs already. Moreover, on
| the cultural side of things, where red indicates restriction,
| blue indicates recommendation and instruction (compare traffic
| signs).
|
| So, I think, blue was quite a natural choice.
| namanyayg wrote:
| All these screenshots look so beautiful. No telemetry, no
| gamification, just function.
| bityard wrote:
| Man what a weirdly speculative article. Is this what Mozilla
| employees are being paid to do these days?
|
| It's basically a tour of old hyperlink and windowing systems...
| with lots of guessing and maybes. I'm not sure why it's relevant
| that Win 3.1 had blue titlebars, for instance. The author never
| actually answers her question but I imagine the obvious guess is
| the correct one:
|
| Black text on a white background was the predominant GUI style at
| the time (probably due to Mac OS and Windows) and the software
| designers needed a visual cue that the hyperlink was clickable.
| Just underlined wouldn't have worked because underline was
| already a popular style in text processing. So they decided to
| give it a different color too. Blue is the most logical choice as
| it has good contrast against a white background, and has a
| neutral meaning (compared to say, red). There weren't really a
| lot of color choices back then, the largest palette you could
| count on at the time was 16 colors.
|
| This was what Mosaic did and most browsers that came after it
| (including the most influential: Netscape) did what Mosaic did.
|
| And there certainly were browsers of the era that didn't use blue
| underline for links, the next most common paradigm was some kind
| of bordered box around the text (usually the same color as the
| text).
| queuebert wrote:
| Reads like a really young person who is overconfident in their
| abilities and lacks any actual experience with any of the
| things they mention. Every geezer on here knows Mosaic had blue
| links because they _used_ it.
| SavantIdiot wrote:
| I agree, I don't think there's enough research here. If it were
| just one browser, perhaps designer choice.
|
| But it is two browsers that chose blue, so perhaps there is
| some underlying Unix-y reason. Maybe early ncurses had chosen
| that blue for something unrelated to the web, and the decision
| goes back further.
|
| Or maybe it was just lack of choices. For example, of the 16
| original hex colors, blue & purple IMHO look the least like
| crap when mixed in with black text. Maybe its just that simple?
| red is too alarming, green is too bright,
| yellow/magenta/cyan/grey are too hard to read... now _I 'm_
| speculating, but I think the answer might be an unrelated
| pattern in some other color-related origin.
| not2b wrote:
| Mosaic and Netscape didn't do black text on a white background.
| The default background was gray.
| ebruchez wrote:
| I seem to remember (Sun workstations) that Mosaic was white
| while Netscape was gray.
| andy_ppp wrote:
| "Black text on a white background was the predominant GUI
| style at the time (probably due to Mac OS and Windows) and
| the software designers needed a visual cue that the hyperlink
| was clickable."
|
| For a comment complaining about unsubstantiated speculation
| this struck me as exactly that...
| wahern wrote:
| The default background was gray for Netscape, even on
| Windows, presumably because that was the default background
| for common Unix toolkits like Motif/X. Even Internet
| Explorer defaulted to gray. See these Wikipedia articles
| containing screenshots:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ViolaWWW
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mosaic_(web_browser)
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_2
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Netscape_Navigator
|
| In particular, notice the IE2 screenshot, which shows it
| displaying the more modern Wikipedia website using a gray
| background. IE2 doesn't understand CSS, so just displays
| the source. The CSS declares a white background, so we can
| infer that the HTML probably does _not_ declare a gray
| background using the long forgotten BODY tag BGCOLOR
| attribute. (Rather, almost certainly the HTML doesn 't use
| the BGCOLOR attribute at all.)
|
| It's possible that Mosaic defaulted to white on Mac OS, but
| I doubt it. Netscape didn't back then, IIRC.
|
| For a long time gray and gray-toned backgrounds were
| ubiquitous on the web. It was nice because white
| backgrounds are difficult on the eyes, especially for
| prolonged periods. Unfortunately, white eventually began to
| dominate, as it already did for most Windows and Mac
| applications. Now we're coming full circle with dark
| theming, though dark theming is typically much darker than
| the old web and old X applications.
| lupire wrote:
| Why not green?
| ezconnect wrote:
| Maybe people back then want something different because the
| most common monitor back in the day was a green on black
| monitor. Having blue is refreshing looks new.
| blablabla123 wrote:
| That's really speculation but there are certainly reasons
| against it. Mostly that red-green blindness is the most
| common color blindness and that blue is considered a more
| serious color. For instance banks often choose blue as
| predominant color. Maybe that's also something worth
| considering for an experimental technology.
| mikepurvis wrote:
| Green/Red has a connotation; plus green has poorer contrast.
| Blue is meaning-neutral and reads well.
| rusk wrote:
| Blue has an established connotation for marking up text.
| E.g once upon a time a newspaper editor would scribble
| notes in original copy before sending to the printers. It
| stands out against black text but is unobtrusive.
| leephillips wrote:
| That was a particular hue called "non-photo blue". It
| photographed as white when using the common photo-offset
| printing process. So you could make comments, on the
| camera-ready copy, that people could read, but that
| wouldn't reproduce. I'm old and had proofreading jobs in
| high school.
| addingnumbers wrote:
| I'm confused, is it really camera-ready if the editor
| still has comments?
|
| What are these comments? "Nice word choice" "No changes
| here" "This is perfect" "(smiley face)"
| leephillips wrote:
| It's camera-ready but might get some comments from a
| last-chance lookover: "Should this be capitalized?"
| written in the margin, for example. If the answer is no,
| it's OK as is, then the copy can go to the camera without
| having to be set again. This is more a proofreading stage
| than an editing stage; that part is long over.
|
| EDIT: Also used for printing instructions, to make sure
| that things come out in the right order, for instance.
| rusk wrote:
| My understanding was in those days copy and paste was a
| literal thing, so I guess what eventually went to the
| printer might end up being a frankendoc of sorts ...
| leephillips wrote:
| There is a neat technique called "stripping in" that lets
| you cut a word out of the page and replace it with the
| corrected word from another page. You can use it to
| correct a misspelling if the length of the corrected word
| is the same as the wrong one; it avoids having to reset
| the whole page.
|
| You put the page with the correct word underneath the
| copy, on a light table (a real one). With an exacto
| knife, carefully cut out the word, cutting through both
| sheets. Now the correct word fits exactly in the hole.
| Hold it together with a piece of white tape (standard
| supply in all these shops) on the back. The mend is
| invisible.
| kbelder wrote:
| It was also the color in which TSR would print maps for
| old Dungeons and Dragons modules, so that players
| couldn't photocopy them and pass them around. Functioned
| as copy-protection.
| leephillips wrote:
| Oh yes, I forgot that many ordinary photocopiers also see
| non-photo blue as white.
| reaperducer wrote:
| For the same reason they didn't use red. Red and green have
| meaning in many cultures, especially the one that invented
| the web. As stated by the parent commenter, blue is more
| neutral.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| "While red made the links easier to spot, user
| comprehension and recollection of the content declined."
| -Ben Shneiderman
|
| Ben likes to actually run controlled experiments and
| measure things like that, instead of just speculating! ;)
|
| See the email quoted here:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28317104
| satao wrote:
| Last year Mozilla laid off a lot of people from the MDN team.
| This might be the result of cutting costs for them.
| moralestapia wrote:
| >Is this what Mozilla employees are being paid to do these
| days?
|
| That would explain whatever happened to Firefox.
|
| Shameless plug: If anyone is looking to get rid of Chrome but
| don't like Firefox for any reason, try Brave, it is a great
| browser, really.
| smoldesu wrote:
| Or Ungoogled Chromium, if you're more interested in
| protecting your privacy than you are collecting $0.30 of
| digital currency every month.
| jrockway wrote:
| > Is this what Mozilla employees are being paid to do these
| days?
|
| Mozilla amazes me with their org-bloat-to-products-they-sell-
| for-money ratio. They have programming language teams, research
| bloggers, occasional splashy products, an in-house bug tracker,
| and oh yeah, they make a web browser.
|
| I don't know how they do it, but it seems to be working out for
| them. If I was the CEO of a company that only had one customer,
| I would probably not be hiring software engineers to write a
| programming language that's not even used for the core product.
| But, I guess that's why nobody ever asks me to be the CEO of a
| company!
| nx7487 wrote:
| > I would probably not be hiring software engineers to write
| a programming language that's not even used for the core
| product.
|
| Rust is used in Firefox
| tomerv wrote:
| I'm really glad that Mozilla is developing Rust. Even though
| I'm not using it (and haven't even learned it), it looks like
| a net positive for the world of software development. This is
| exactly the kind of thing that a nonprofit should do.
| ksherlock wrote:
| Most of the rusty Mozilla team was laid off last year. Also:
| the MDN team.
| [deleted]
| feffe wrote:
| Maybe because blue is the most visible color against a white
| background, except for black? Like blue and black are the two
| most common pen ink colors.
| SubiculumCode wrote:
| Well, for the most part, they aren't anymore. Blue, I mean.
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