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danirod 11 hours ago [-]
One nerdy detail about old operating systems and graphics cards: due to the way the VGA color palette works, the teal background used in Windows 98 and earlier versions of Windows was actually lighter than #008080 if the computer was configured to use 16 colors (not 256 colors):
Another nerdy detail: the default background color on Windows XP was different depending on whether the theme was Luna or Classic. On Classic it is the same one as Windows 2000, but for Luna it is more blueish. I understand the denial, but it will be the 25st anniversary of the XP release in a few months, so it probably qualifies as classic by now.
accrual 8 hours ago [-]
I always liked the feeling of getting a proper video driver installed and unlocking "true color" support, the desktop background and icons were suddenly much richer and saturated.
millerm 10 hours ago [-]
I remember that good feeling when getting a new windows 9x machine up and running or installing a new video card, updating the graphics driver to get the display into 16M colors, and enjoying the darker teal. The color itself felt like an upgrade. When that brighter teal appeared you knew you didn't have the driver set, even before seeing any icons.
Man, I wish I could have the 90s back. I absolutely despise where we went with tech in the past decade. I suppose that's a me problem.
keito 5 hours ago [-]
The top-right (16 color) version gives me a "safe mode" tingly sensation :) I didn't know about the Luna/Classic distinction - I guess you don't usually see the Luna color since it's hidden behind Bliss.
vlowrian 10 hours ago [-]
That's cool, thanks for sharing. I like the idea of adding XP as an anniversary gift ;)
colinhb 7 hours ago [-]
Some overlooked iconic backgrounds/color-schemes for me:
I always loved that purple/slate blue colour of WindowMaker/GNUStep/NeXTSTEP.
flowercalled 11 hours ago [-]
I can understand using an llm to build your website. But I can't understand using it to write copy, especially when it's so unnecessary here.
vlowrian 10 hours ago [-]
Agreed. A bit of context on that: I wanted to add some fun facts or relevant information to some of the colors, OSs, etc. and I wrote this in German and let the LLM do the translation. However,it looked pretty weird when navigating through the page and most colors and roughly half of the OSs did show up with an empty label. So it was a visual decision to let the LLM fill in the gaps.
But you're right. It's damaging to the actual facts and research I added myself. It might be better to remove the text where it's just an LLM placeholder.
Larger copies (like about and privacy) are written by me and then LLM translated.
cimi_ 10 hours ago [-]
I like the website, great work!
The LLM descriptions are terrible though :) here's the one for Windows 98:
> Windows 98 refined the 95 formula, folding the web into the shell with Active Desktop while keeping the familiar look. Its Display Properties carried over the same grid of basic swatches and named schemes — teal still the Windows Standard default — with the classic reserved system colors tuned to their canonical values.
Instead of this, maybe find some copy related to the os (some quotes from the media / internet archive / something)?
vlowrian 10 hours ago [-]
That's actually a pretty cool idea, noted. Thanks!
rideontime 11 hours ago [-]
Seconded. The "personality" it tries to add is trite and tiresome and everybody immediately sees it for what it is, especially for a case like this where there's only so many ways to say "this is the default desktop color of an operating system." Not only that, but it's confusing - is "Windows Classic blue" a real thing, or just an attempt at a cute phrase? Just label the colors and be done with it.
vlowrian 10 hours ago [-]
It's actually not so easy to pick a speaking name for each color, since many colors are used in different OSs. I tried to use neutral and standard color names were they exist. Things like Windows Classic blue are probably always description-slop, though.
Another user suggested to use media quotes etc. on OSs, which I think is actually a pretty good idea. I might swap the LLM generated placeholders for something like that.
echoangle 7 hours ago [-]
Why do you even need the text? Just show the color, year and the name of the OS.
vlowrian 1 hours ago [-]
In many cases, there is some additional information I want to add, like which themes the colors were used as background color in, or which palette they come from if there are several different.
I also discovered a lot about the different OSs while researching the colors and I think it's a nice nod towards the museum character of the site to add fun/nerd facts when I stumble upon them.
But true, in many cases there is no need for text - I just removed the tagline which didn't add anything useful.
torh 10 hours ago [-]
My favorite was the blue in Windows 2000. Never cared much for the green in Windows 95/98. When installing Windows 98 later (because games) I would try to set up the same blue. Instead of getting it correct, I guessed, and ended up with #336699 which was easy to remember and "close enough". I see now that it's closer to Haiku (almost perfect, #336698) than Windows 2000.
cosmic_cheese 9 hours ago [-]
Same. The lighter gray 2000 uses compared to 9x is also much more pleasant.
It might sound ridiculous but using 9x with the default theme felt a bit depressing. It conjures images of being stuck in a building with that awful fluorescent overhead lighting on a day where it’s dark and dreary outside.
2000 on the other hand is about as refreshing as a gray 3D beveled OS theme can look, on par with Mac OS platinum and maybe slightly edged out by the bright colorful sunny tab titlebars of BeOS.
t0mas88 1 hours ago [-]
I agree, the color was great, and also in general Windows 2000 was very good. I used both the desktop and server versions for years. After that Windows XP made me switch to Linux. Since then I've only really used Debian and Mac OS.
I recently tried installing Windows 11 on a PC to run some games. The contrast with Windows 2000 is crazy, what a mess. Even just the control panel has three different UI frameworks mixed in one application. The whole thing is slow on a modern CPU with 64gb ram.
How did they get from Windows 2000 which arguably may have been ahead of Linux in terms of kernel and at least on par if not better than Mac OS in terms of UX to todays version of Windows 11?
queenkjuul 3 hours ago [-]
Windows 2000 is the epitome of Windows UI to me, probably because my first PC had Me which borrowed the desktop from it. As i kid I didn't even notice it was different from the 98 machines at school, but when i set up 98SE for retro gaming as an adult I couldn't shake this "something isn't quite how i remember" feeling.
Then i set up 2000 as a server for the retro machines and everything clicked. Kind of amazing how many control panels in Windows 10 and 11 are essentially unchanged from 2000
VCFundedGenYer 6 hours ago [-]
The descriptions under the colors are very obviously LLM generated and make little sense. No human would make statements like what is written under each entry. Contains many LLM-isms like em-dashes, loaded words, and load-bearing phrases (emphasis intended). Consider removing or rewriting those bits.
vlowrian 1 hours ago [-]
You're right. This also came up in other comments. I just removed pretty much all AI placeholder texts or descriptors or replaced them with "hand-written" content, where I found additional context helpful or interesting.
khazhoux 2 hours ago [-]
What is a load bearing phrase here?
t0mas88 1 hours ago [-]
It's a joke, Claude AI calls everything load bearing. Once you see it it cannot be unseen.
timbit42 1 hours ago [-]
Where are the 8-bit systems? Not all of them were black.
johng 56 minutes ago [-]
Solaris 9 and Haiku OS are the tops.
ocdjeremy 5 hours ago [-]
It's often said that scent is tightly associated with memory, but simply looking at these colors sends me on multiple trips down memory lane.
I second the post from imfemambocus on color-sampling provenance. It would be useful to know the exact source for each.
h2aichat 2 hours ago [-]
I feel old when I realize that I have used most of them!
stronglikedan 4 hours ago [-]
BleskOS's color seems... offensive. Perhaps they don't want people living on their desktop.
RattlesnakeJake 3 hours ago [-]
I can't even describe how many spots this hit for me.
russellbeattie 3 hours ago [-]
I was pretty surprised at how I both immediately recognized each desktop color, but also how each of them "felt". I could picture the icons and menus in my mind, and their location (left, right, top, bottom) and knew how the mouse would respond as well.
I suspect there's some sort of strong association going on with color and tool use in our monkey brains.
consumer451 7 hours ago [-]
This isn't a "desktop," but C64's dark blue background appears to be #403285. That was the color of my very early childhood.
summermusic 8 hours ago [-]
When I was just getting into Linux and trying out all the random window managers, I found that I really liked the hues of green and purple that Blackbox came with.
summermusic 6 hours ago [-]
Update: I went into the source code and found the colors I was fond of. I didn't care for the red but I'm including it for completeness
I agree, Blackbox is still one of the WMs on my wishlist.
lucideer 11 hours ago [-]
Windows 2008 is the teal desktop I remember fondly - they brought it back after going blue in Windows 2003. I'm presuming it was the same #008080 shade as '95 & '98.
_joel 10 hours ago [-]
It's strange how seeing the default NT4 and 2k colours take me straight back to a fresh install 25+ years ago. First job was doing desktop rollouts so I'd see it a lot!
tuzemec 10 hours ago [-]
For the past 20+ years I'm using the same desktop color across various OSes: #000000
This is one of the first things that I modify on a fresh install.
This is great. I've been meaning to work out what windows NT background colour is for years. My desktop now is solid that :)
scrumper 9 hours ago [-]
Huh, I do not remember Windows 1.0 being that shade of green but screenshots confirm what's here.
vlowrian 1 hours ago [-]
AFAIK, the actual color was highly dependent on the hardware used (e.g. video adapter, CRT, etc.). That's why photographs of a Windows 1.0 screen might look vastly different.
The color I listed is what Windows outputs on the software side. It's pretty much an EGA dither of bright cyan and bright green. It's what you would get with todays hardware.
pavon 5 hours ago [-]
Interestingly, none of the screenshots I can find show the dithering that the article talks about, and all the contemporary photographs of monitors show a less green blue background. I think maybe something is being lost in emulation?
Narishma 8 hours ago [-]
It probably looked much less neon bright on the displays of the time. Same for Windows 2.0.
drybjed 9 hours ago [-]
First I looked for was Atari 1040 STE TOS green background, and it's not there. Bummer.
voodooEntity 9 hours ago [-]
No os² feel like this list should have gotten more entries and love before publishing
zebproj 11 hours ago [-]
There's no "Hot Dog Stand", so the collection is incomplete.
Me too! The Workbench Blue is actually my current desktop background :)
vivid242 11 hours ago [-]
I sometimes catch myself recreating the Win95 color on my Mac. Thanks for this!
newsomix9xl 11 hours ago [-]
Where's plan9?
rzzzt 9 hours ago [-]
Exactly!
rcarmo 11 hours ago [-]
Delightful, even if I don’t recall Solaris
nobrains 5 hours ago [-]
DOS #000000
iAMkenough 10 hours ago [-]
OS X Aqua Blue!
queenkjuul 4 hours ago [-]
I like the colors but I'm personally getting very sick of every single website using That One Font Claude Likes for everything.
I think the mono is IBM Plex? Idk what the other one is, but I'll be looking it up so as to be certain i never use it in my projects lol
imfemambocus 10 hours ago [-]
The one thing I would add to each swatch is where the number came from. A value read out of a palette table and a value sampled from a screenshot are not the same number, and the difference is invisible.
I ran into this today on something unrelated. A page painted #0b0d14, and macOS screencapture wrote rgb(8,13,16) into the file, because the capture lands in the display's colour space rather than sRGB. Handing that same hex to a video encoder gave a third answer, rgb(9,11,17), this time from the yuv conversion. I had to ask for #0a0f13 to get back the value the page had actually painted.
So any swatch sampled from a screenshot of a running install is drifted by a few levels, silently, and a CRT is a further step away again. One line per entry saying "documented VGA palette" or "sampled from a VM" would make this citable rather than just lovely to scroll, and it would settle the Windows 98 teal question in the sibling comment.
“In most computer display systems, images are encoded with a gamma of about 0.45 and decoded with the reciprocal gamma of 2.2. A notable exception, until the release of Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) in September 2009, were Macintosh computers, which encoded with a gamma of 0.55 and decoded with a gamma of 1.8”
https://twitter.com/bakertechsrvcs/status/162629846037367193...
https://xcancel.com/bakertechsrvcs/status/162629846037367193...
Another nerdy detail: the default background color on Windows XP was different depending on whether the theme was Luna or Classic. On Classic it is the same one as Windows 2000, but for Luna it is more blueish. I understand the denial, but it will be the 25st anniversary of the XP release in a few months, so it probably qualifies as classic by now.
Man, I wish I could have the 90s back. I absolutely despise where we went with tech in the past decade. I suppose that's a me problem.
NeXTSTEP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP#/media/File:NeXTSTEP_...
Plan9/Rio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs#/media/F...
But you're right. It's damaging to the actual facts and research I added myself. It might be better to remove the text where it's just an LLM placeholder.
Larger copies (like about and privacy) are written by me and then LLM translated.
The LLM descriptions are terrible though :) here's the one for Windows 98:
> Windows 98 refined the 95 formula, folding the web into the shell with Active Desktop while keeping the familiar look. Its Display Properties carried over the same grid of basic swatches and named schemes — teal still the Windows Standard default — with the classic reserved system colors tuned to their canonical values.
Instead of this, maybe find some copy related to the os (some quotes from the media / internet archive / something)?
Another user suggested to use media quotes etc. on OSs, which I think is actually a pretty good idea. I might swap the LLM generated placeholders for something like that.
I also discovered a lot about the different OSs while researching the colors and I think it's a nice nod towards the museum character of the site to add fun/nerd facts when I stumble upon them.
But true, in many cases there is no need for text - I just removed the tagline which didn't add anything useful.
It might sound ridiculous but using 9x with the default theme felt a bit depressing. It conjures images of being stuck in a building with that awful fluorescent overhead lighting on a day where it’s dark and dreary outside.
2000 on the other hand is about as refreshing as a gray 3D beveled OS theme can look, on par with Mac OS platinum and maybe slightly edged out by the bright colorful sunny tab titlebars of BeOS.
I recently tried installing Windows 11 on a PC to run some games. The contrast with Windows 2000 is crazy, what a mess. Even just the control panel has three different UI frameworks mixed in one application. The whole thing is slow on a modern CPU with 64gb ram.
How did they get from Windows 2000 which arguably may have been ahead of Linux in terms of kernel and at least on par if not better than Mac OS in terms of UX to todays version of Windows 11?
Then i set up 2000 as a server for the retro machines and everything clicked. Kind of amazing how many control panels in Windows 10 and 11 are essentially unchanged from 2000
I second the post from imfemambocus on color-sampling provenance. It would be useful to know the exact source for each.
I suspect there's some sort of strong association going on with color and tool use in our monkey brains.
Grey: #aaaaaa Green: #77aa77 Purple: #9077aa Blue: #7790aa Red: #aa5555
Source: https://github.com/bradleythughes/blackbox/tree/master/data/...
"Windows 7 boots slower if you set a solid background color" 28.jan.2025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42856262 117 comments
"Why did Windows 7 log on slower for months if you had a solid color background?" 28.apr.2025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43827214 296 comments
The color I listed is what Windows outputs on the software side. It's pretty much an EGA dither of bright cyan and bright green. It's what you would get with todays hardware.
I think the mono is IBM Plex? Idk what the other one is, but I'll be looking it up so as to be certain i never use it in my projects lol
I ran into this today on something unrelated. A page painted #0b0d14, and macOS screencapture wrote rgb(8,13,16) into the file, because the capture lands in the display's colour space rather than sRGB. Handing that same hex to a video encoder gave a third answer, rgb(9,11,17), this time from the yuv conversion. I had to ask for #0a0f13 to get back the value the page had actually painted.
So any swatch sampled from a screenshot of a running install is drifted by a few levels, silently, and a CRT is a further step away again. One line per entry saying "documented VGA palette" or "sampled from a VM" would make this citable rather than just lovely to scroll, and it would settle the Windows 98 teal question in the sibling comment.
“In most computer display systems, images are encoded with a gamma of about 0.45 and decoded with the reciprocal gamma of 2.2. A notable exception, until the release of Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) in September 2009, were Macintosh computers, which encoded with a gamma of 0.55 and decoded with a gamma of 1.8”