Visi On by VisiCorp – The obscure first full GUI for the IBM PC

https://web.archive.org/web/20030609235119/http://toastytech...

This web site is what I would call the old school internet with "warning under construction" and direct email.

This used to be how personal web-log's, now known as blogs, were formatted : http://toastytech.com/guis/news.html

"12/31/01 Move to new server with addr.com. Old sever was from Interliant, which was bought out."

http://toastytech.com/about/index.html

EDIT: If anyone wondered what many of these pages in the mid 90's really looked like, here it is : http://toastytech.com/evil/index.html

Besides, it is also faster to render.

It may have also made a solid color on composite CGA.

Like things that rely on ntsc artifact colors. In emulators and on vga/hdmi they are just white pixels on black in odd seeming arrangement. But via composite to a color crt they become sensible images with black, white, red, and blue areas from a source video mode that was just 1bpp.

In fact these could be exactly that. (probably not but possible, and I'll say both the for and against arguments)

Alternating single pixel vertical black & white lines, is exactly how you get solid blue or solid red from a b&w signal fed over ntsc composite to a color crt.

(or lcd depending on the composite input electronics. It's not really the crt that matters but the ntsc signal. I have seen tvs and monitors that replicated the original fuzziness and ntsc artifacts, and ones that digitized the input to produce an artificially perfect, and thus actually wrong image like an emulator that is ignorant of such display hardware details.)

But countering that theory is that I would expect software of this nature and from this time to be optimized for monochrome displays, as in, Herculese, because the crts were all mono and this gave far more detail for text and information-dense graphics. High res color was either unavailable or stupid expensive. Color was low res, ate all your ram, and was more for games and schhool computers. Feeding a mono signal via ntsc to a color tv would be an absolute garbage way to try to do office productivity work, and ntsc color artifacts don't happen in cga or other rgb formats even though the screen is a color crt.

So, all in all, I think this simply needs to be tried on some actual Herculese, ttl mono, rgb, cga, and ega screens to see what the intended look was. It was probably a compromise that didn't look as good as possible on any one type of display, but looked acceptable on all of them.

Actually thinking more, it may be simply mostly about the scanlines.

Maybe it was cheaper code to have all the background lines the same rather than 2 alternating lines to make a checkerboard, and probably vertical lines that crossed the crt scanlines was better than horizontal lines that would combine with scanlines in annoying ugly ways.

Or yet another consideration, the pattern simply needed to be distinct from the diagonals and other patterns in other areas. The different patterns are taking the place of colors. None of the patterns look especially great on their own, but they do the more important job of being easily distinct from each other, like hatch/fill patterns on architectural and landscaping drawings.