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Comment by SeanLuke | Hacker News Reader

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.

See for example:

https://www.w3.org/History/1994/WWW/Journals/CACM/screensnap...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WorldWideWeb#/media/File:World...

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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?

1. https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/WorldWideWeb.html

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

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.

(Edit: lol, we're investigating in parallel.)

The oldest code I can find is here:

https://browsers.evolt.org/browsers/archive/worldwideweb/NeX...

WWWNextStep_0.15.tar.gz is dated 1993. It's imported here:

https://github.com/cynthia/WorldWideWeb/

Oh, but what is this:

https://github.com/cynthia/WorldWideWeb/blob/master/NextStep...

26 March 91 version 0.8

Changed anchor highlighting from dark grey to underline, now underline is available. (I may make underline &/or colour a user preference or style later.)

So we know that in March of 1991, links were underlined with a thought toward color in the future.

And here's the implementation:

https://github.com/cynthia/WorldWideWeb/blob/62b3c9b5082e455...

Which looks to me like it uses the default text color with the option to be changed via style:

https://github.com/cynthia/WorldWideWeb/blob/62b3c9b5082e455...

my thoughts exactly! what if you run the original version of WorldWideWeb on a color NeXT?

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)

No, gray rendered as gray.

didn't the NeXT also have a built-in "digital library"? i think it shipped with an encyclopedia. did that have hyperlinks? what color were they?

Didn't work that way. See:

http://www.shawcomputing.net/resources/next/software/bundled...

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