Don't know the details anymore, but the default experience on major Linuxen was to display plain files in blue color (eg. when listing files using the ls command). So that when you switched to an inverse (white-on-black) video setting from the default black-on-white, you had a hard time to read blue-on-black text for one of the most basic tasks on the command line without resorting to customize terminal colors. Don't know who came up with such a usability fail.