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Comment by pshirshov | Hacker News Reader

Cool. Does not support dark mode though.

There was no dark mode fad in 1998. Different color schemes for visually impaired people existed, but they were most often not very aesthetic.

it's not a fad.

Yeah, I do seem te recall dark mode being better for people with... I think it was cataract? Though with that notable exception dark mode is of course entirely superfluous.

I remember Encarta being darkmode in 98. Maybe some of the MSN stuff too. Even painted their own titlebars differently.

You are correct. There was no OOTB dark mode in 1998. I remember it well because I wasted some time every now and then trying to make one using the appearance control panel. It was frustrating because I could come very close to a universal dark mode. But I remember certain types of text couldn't have their color independently set. One of them (body text? can't remember) used the same color as title bars. Which would make it unusable in a proper dark mode.

I guess I was slightly ahead of my time in wanting system wide dark mode. XP with the theming hacks made me very happy.

Microsoft did actually make a "dark" XP theme. It was available "officially" available but they didn't really market it and it had limited adoption. I stumbled upon it and thought I was v cool for using it.

https://archive.org/details/WindowsXPRoyaleNoirTheme

I didn't know about that one. Looks nicer than the one I ended up using.

Another problem with this was that some software was just broken. For some reason, some devs explicitly set the text color of labels in their software to black instead of the system default color, but left everything else—including the background—to use the system's color. So you end up with black on black for your dark theme.

DarkReader extension (available on all browsers) makes everything have DarkMode. Unless you’re visiting a website designed by <canvas /> loving sadists, then you’ll need a welding helmet.

Honest question, because I don’t remember: does Windows 98?

I know you could edit the theme around to set the UI scheme colours to a darker one, but as a kid I could never make it look nice

There were preset themes. Some were dark.

They certainly weren’t really a “dark mode” in the modern usage though I thought, they had ridiculously high contrast still around parts of it?

I don’t remember any of those dark presets being that dark either except for the High Contrast one — but this is going to drive me nuts all day now so I’m going to dig through a Win98 VM and see what I can find!

If there’s one that’s a good fit, might be a fun pull request to write for this project :)

I do remember a high contrast mode. Quite garish with white text on black background with bright blues and I think yellow and red too.

I think this might be it: https://never-obsolete.tumblr.com/post/180144131029/high-con...

edit: yellow and red is from win 3.1's hotdog mode: https://blog.codinghorror.com/a-tribute-to-the-windows-31-ho...

Speaking of yellow and red .. don't forget the noteworthy and stunning specimen, HotDog Linux.

https://hotdoglinux.com/

You could come close to a proper dark mode, but would fall short. That's with using the color scheme editor in the control panels. I wasted too much time back in '98 trying to make a proper dark mode. Not that we called it that back then.

The downfall was a type of text (body text?) which used the same color as the titlebar. It couldn't be independently set. Was a bit frustrating back then.

There were the high contrast modes back then, but they were too ugly to use unless you needed the contrast.

Yeah that’s exactly what I remembered: you could make some of the UI dark for sure, but it wasn’t a real dark mode like we expect today; there was still a fair bit of light colouring because it didn’t have enough flexibility?

Definitely was stuck with either light coloring somewhere, or difficult to read text. I remember experimenting with different shades of gray for either the background or the text, but couldn't find one which would work on both dark and light backgrounds. And you'd always have a light background popping up somewhere.

In retrospect, it's a little funny. Apparently the coders & designers at Microsoft in the 90's never anticipated someone wanting a mostly dark desktop. They'd come up with crazy color schemes like Hot Dog, but never any gray & black schemes.

No, you could do it. There is the limitation GP mentions, but that just meant you were limited in choice. Like you had to pick a text color that would look good on title bars and on window background.

There was however no reason software had to adhere to that. You were free to make your app as colorful as possible. Some devs were nice enough to set the text color to black but leave everything else to use the system theme, so with your dark theme you end up with a nice black on black. I think there were even some Microsoft apps that shipped with windows that had parts that were just "hard-coded" to a light theme.

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