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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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 .
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).
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
“ Gopher Protocol was created at the University of Minnesota for searching and retrieving documents. Its original design featured green text on a black background.”
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?
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
>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.
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.
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).
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.
> 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.
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.
The part about project xanadu is also shady. They list it as 1964, but first paper was published 1965, while their idea of hypertext was born 1960, with the word choosen 1963. Not sure where the 1964 comes from. Not to mention that this wasn't even an actual implementation. It's disputable whether xanadu really should be the first one to mention here. The ideas of referencing documents is older and has previous implementations in analog world. It they wanna go just about hypertext, they should at least started with memex.
WorldWideWeb was created by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other's garages.
This is a reference to a bizarre anachronism in David Graeber's writing. The conflict over this passage once carried over to the comments here on HN while Graeber was still alive, and he and a longtime foe quarreled about it to a fairly unsatisfactory conclusion.
> 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.
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.
Readit News
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...
Can you find a screenshot definitively from before 1993 that shows blue hyperlinks?
1. https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/WorldWideWeb.html
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.
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)
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.]
This is why Apple makes Android users have white on green text, the least readable choice.
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).
The timeline might undermine my assumption.
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.
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".
"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...
You could use names, or you could use colors whose RGB components were each multiples of 0x33. (00, 33, 66, 99, cc, ff)
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
I think some browsers understood X11 color names like "blue" or "DarkSlateGray", but there are more than 216 of those, so same caveat applies.
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.
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
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 .
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.
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
- 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
Yeah. All you need to know about this article.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
(a/k/a Cunningham's Law)
This is what it looked like: http://toastytech.com/guis/win30help.png
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.
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.
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.
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!
WorldWideWeb was created by (mostly Republican) computer engineers who broke from IBM in Silicon Valley in the 1980s, forming little democratic circles of twenty to forty people with their laptops in each other's garages.
> 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.