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Comment by bdcravens | Hacker News Reader

Never wrote a line of code in Turbo Pascal afterward, but taking it in HS (somewhat on accident) in 1995 was what set the trajectory for the rest of my life.

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Same here. Even now, I still sometimes set my vim colors to blue background and yellow/white text.

That was a common choice for TUI software running in the 16-color PC textmode palette. I suppose the blue provided a "dark" background with less contrast than actual black. (TUI programs of the era generally had a pure black-and-white mode too, and the overall look there was not unlike that of *nix terminal-based software.)

I suspect it was in rather large measure because white on blue was the default for the DOS prompt in the early-mid eighties, and that in turn I always thought was because those were the colours of IBM's logo.

Cool. I should try that. I was a heavy TP user too.

Man, this reminds me of amber screen monitors. I liked them better than the green screen ones, but somehow, the amber ones seemed to be much less popular, at least in areas where I was.

I used blue/yellow in Emacs until I bought a laptop with a glossy screen in 2011. Now it's grey/yellow. Some habits die hard.

Similar story here. I started with like 12 casually with C and later C++ in multiple attempts and failed, but TP brought me the joy of programming. And later I could master all other languages (including C/C++).

I will never forget how great it is to have some simple IDE with a "run" button/key, and build simple UI toys with points/lines/rectangles/... (what was it? tortoise? turtle? idk) for a school kid in that age. it was pure magic to bend pixels to my will.

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