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Comment by dystroy | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Agreed. I'm kind of shocked that the author didn't just ask people who were on the mosaic team.

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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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

This helps explain why they chose blue. Green and red can be difficult to read on a grey background.

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