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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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
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?
It’s a long, desperate and complicated tale as the Windows team, frightened by their own shadows, attempted to head off any and all possible competition. From web views to tablet interfaces and every other mistake you can see the legacy of it in windows 11. The tablet/touch screen panic also affected Linux as well but at least most of the worst of that has been fixed.
When I get jobs to work on older systems I get a visceral sick feeling whenever the server version of windows with the touch screen interface comes up in RDP. Hideous and useless.
Win2k was easily the best thing they ever did. Every version of server since then has pushed admins to linux
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”
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?
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.
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.
Noted. Plan9/Rio was actually on my list for the initial release, but it is currently broken in the Virtual OS Museum (https://virtualosmuseum.org/) and I couldn't find any other reliable sources.
But it's still on the todo list and I've also added NeXTSTEP.
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.
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.
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[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 36.2 ms ] threadhttps://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.
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 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?
When I get jobs to work on older systems I get a visceral sick feeling whenever the server version of windows with the touch screen interface comes up in RDP. Hideous and useless.
Win2k was easily the best thing they ever did. Every version of server since then has pushed admins to linux
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”
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.
Grey: #aaaaaa Green: #77aa77 Purple: #9077aa Blue: #7790aa Red: #aa5555
Source: https://github.com/bradleythughes/blackbox/tree/master/data/...
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 it's still on the todo list and I've also added NeXTSTEP.
I second the post from imfemambocus on color-sampling provenance. It would be useful to know the exact source for each.
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