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Comment by 1000100_1000101 | Hacker News Reader

Dark mode was the traditional normal.

From early green or amber text on black mono displays. Grey on black DOS text mode. Light Blue on Dark Blue C-64. Apple 2's grey/white (I don't recall) on black. Even GUI wise, Amiga used a dark-blue background as the default Workbench, with user selectable palettes for everything.

It was Microsoft Windows that changed the paradigm to default to a searing white display with black text in most apps, like Notepad, Word, etc., because "it's more like paper". Sure, paper is white, but it's not glowing white. That transition was painful.

I'm glad to see dark-modes return, I agree there needs to be an option, not just forced dark-mode. Preferably light mode options to use a not-as-bright-as-possible white too.

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No, dark mode is not traditional normal.

Paper was, which is black on white.

And you shouldn't have your device or monitor set to glowing white -- turn the brightness down so it's the same as a sheet of paper next to it.

And Windows didn't change the paradigm, the Mac was the first widely available consumer device which did. And its built-in CRT wasn't especially glowing either -- it was less bright than paper in traditional office lighting.

Early computers had "dark" color schemes because the resolution was so low and pixels "bled" brightness, that it was easier to read. As technology improved, that problem thankfully went away, and it's easier on the eyes to read dark text on a light background, regardless of print or screen.

Given that screens are always adding their own light, it’s impossible for a screen to ever be equally bright as a piece of paper next to it. The screen will always be brighter.

No because some surfaces reflect more of the light than other sufaces.

That depends entirely on ambient light levels.

All screens are brighter than white paper under moon light, almost none are brighter than white paper under midday sun.

And reading under the midday sun is painful, much more so than a bright screen.

If you haven't experienced before, I recommend it. It helps you appreciate just how bright direct sunlight is relative to other light sources.

Do what now? An entirely black OLED screen is certainly going to reflect less of the room’s light than a sheet of white paper. An OLED screen displaying white at 10% of its maximum brightness is also likely going to be less bright than a sheet of white paper in most rooms.

I don’t particularly care what is traditional.

There’s a significant base of users that prefer light mode and dark mode so provide both, it’s generally not difficult to do so.

I disagree that apps should tone down light mode. It’s better that all apps use the same brightness and contrast and then users can adjust their monitor to suit their individual preference.

> There’s a significant base of users that prefer light mode and dark mode so provide both, it’s generally not difficult to do so.

There’s a significant base of users that hate with a passion all low contrast dark gray on light gray (aka llight mode) or light gray on dark gray (aka dark mode). When has the brain of people promoting this been damaged ?

It's also really not necessary to use #FFFFFF as white.

Paper itself is not that shade.

It's not really meaningful without defining lighting and color space. Have you ever seen ink on white paper that was lighter than the paper?

Disagree, white should be standardised as #FFFFFF so that it’s consistent between applications. Then users can adjust how they want “white” to appear by adjusting their screen settings.

Thus forcing a subpar default on everybody intentionally.

No, #FFF is white, and it's up to the client to decide what white should look like.

Arguing that we should use, say, #CCC for white, is like saying that instead of rating things out of a 100, you should rate them out of 70 instead. All you've done is narrow the scale.

Nope. Nobody is talking about what colour is white, but contrast that is forced upon user that hurts eyes.

Which direction of contrast is your problem?

For me, the small contrast on pages like HN (in particular with any of the gray text) strains my eyes because it’s more effort for me to see the letters.

But I also read a reasonable amount of PDFs (black on white) which is relatively comfortable on most of my monitors (LCDs with generally low brightness setting to have less light shine into my eyes).

I think what I am saying is, I agree that what is comfortable depends on the user, so websites not moving off the defaults is better, because then users can configure what works for them.

Addendum: The low contrast example on the article is very uncomfortable to read for me.

#CCC is grey - one of many greys .

Paper, particularly bleached paper, is not "traditional normal" either.

I'm no paleontologist, but originally humans would use substances like ash and fruit to draw/write on rock/leaves/bark, so white/red/colors on grey/green/brown.

I'm something's been normal for a few centuries, I'm comfortable calling it traditional.

Otherwise I'd use a word like "prehistorical".

> Paper was, which is black on white.

check

> Early computers had "dark" color schemes because the resolution was so low and pixels "bled" brightness

this

The contrast ratio of an old CRT (and amber and green were considered more comfortable than white-on-black) is radically different from a modern LCD/IPS/OLED screen. It's so different that there's no comparison. Dark mode might be ok for more people if there is some brightness to the background instead of being completely black, but then you lose most of the benefits of OLED.

Yes

The "true black" OLED displays have their part of the display off where there are black pixels, if I am not wrong. So, wouldn't dark mode suit well for those types of displays?

OLEDs are per-pixel backlighting, so they can go full black on a single pixel.

GP is arguing that exactly because there is no backlight, the contrast between on/off is uncomfortably high on modern screens compared to the CRTs where Windows 2/3 was running.

I agree. Most websites with a dark color scheme use a dark grey background and even off-white text.

Traditional normal is not an absolute statement. Sure DOS / Unix back in the early days of PC displayed black backgrounds due the display's at the time working better this way.

Before that, people shared information in white paper; and the beginning of the internet brought it back with black text over white background.

Therefore there is no canonical traditional normal, it all depends when one joined.

DOS notably used eye-friendly grey text, not bright white.

Paper and paper-like writing surfaces were non-white for a long time before we got bleached white paper.

We haven't yet had a glowing-white paper.

Traditional-normal for computing was a dark background.

There was likely a technological limit in the use of pure white at the start when "emulating" paper. VGA 16-color mode likely meant that the choice was between bright white and medium grey, which was too dark. Configurability has lagged behind though.

no, if you think trad-norm is dark mode, it just identifies when you started using computers.

That was only common for a blip in time where NOTHING was normal because it was all being figured out and cost constraint, not personal or ergonomic preference, drove computing capabilities.

> Even GUI wise, Amiga used a dark-blue background as the default Workbench

That's because of cost. It was expected that many people would be viewing Amiga video output on a television via composite output and white-on-blue is something that TVs are good at displaying. The 1080 was like 1/3rd the cost of the A1000 and I'm willing to bet that many, MANY A500s were hooked up to TVs for at least a while after being opened on Christmas.

I used practically every word processor ever made for Amiga. Except for WordPerfect they were all black text-on-white, and WordPerfect you could change that they just kept the default blue and white to match DOS.

Dark mode was normal in the early days of CRTs, when most CRTs refreshed at 60Hz or lower. The dark background made the flicker less obvious. Once higher refresh rate CRTs became common (1990s), the flicker became less of a problem and light mode became the default.

Wasn't it the original Mac that changed it?

Yeah, it wasn't Windows that changed it, they just hopped on the bandwagon. I remember (SunOS)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SunOS] on a SPARC in 1987 that was black in white text, and Macintosh before that.

Xerox had applications with white backgrounds from the start.

https://crm.org/articles/xerox-parc-and-the-origins-of-gui

And Mac copied it from Xerox. But it was indeed the introduction of GUIs and WYSIWYG "what you see is what you get": the screen had to mimic paper.

It didn't have to though.

Lotus 1-2-3 mimicked a spreadsheet and it is not searing white.

...and Lotus 1-2-3 mimiced visicalc and when I used visicalc (on an HP85a) it had a dark background with a greyish white foreground colour. ie dark mode by default.

Mac likely did use this scheme, and yes, copied it from Xerox. However neither Macs nor Xerox had mainstream use. I'd only actually seen 3 Macs in the wild before their switch to Intel, over 20 years later.

Windows adopting the "paper"-white background and whole world drooling over the arrival of Windows 3.1 and 95 is when it became the standard, I think.

Windows 2 was predominantly dark text on white background. Same with GEM on the Atari ST. Both current in the late 1980s.

Sinclair's ZX Spectrum was black text on white background in 1982.

The ZX Spectrum was black text on a light grey background.

There's no 'likely' about it - the Mac absolutely used white as its background color for document windows and finder folders. It was striking and different when you first encountered one of the early compact Macs to see how white the screen was when you opened MacWrite.

As for the claim that Macs had no 'mainstream use' for 20 years until the Intel switch... your personal Mac-free life is a sad story, but not remotely universal, and while it's certainly true that Macs always had minority market share, it's insane to suggest they weren't influential.

My favorites were actually DOS TUIs, where for some reason blue became a commonly used background color for a lot of things (e.g. Norton Commander, many Borland products, FoxPro...).

Amigas used blue and Atari GEM, alongside DR-DOS and MS-DOS Doshell used white.

Traditionally we were using CRT monitors and 80x24 terminals... it feels silly to hold on to that out of inertia.

Traditionally one was able to change colors. But the new computers with GHz and GB of RAM are not able to do this (Android, Windows)

> It was Microsoft Windows that changed the paradigm to default to a searing white display with black text in most apps

My early 90s Sun SPARCStation was black on white, right from the boot. The xterm default is black on white too, a default that far predates Windows AFAIK.

I don't really know the full history on all of this, but in my limited knowledge, this seems grossly simplified at best since there seem to have been several popular systems before Windows that used white background colours.

[1]: Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f72A9AHigeQ

> That transition was painful.

I was actually alive then, so I can speak to it.

Athena text widgets on X were black on white in the 80's. So was Lisa, Mac, and NeXT, OS/X and SunOS's first GUI. Yes, amber on black was long running, but since you weren't alive then let me tell you something: it sucked. Moving from VT100 (VT104) terminals to actual Sun/Aix machines running X was a HUGE improvement on eye strain.

I was actually alive then, and the painfulness of the white background was real physical eye-strain pain.

I was alive for both amber and green screens too.

Please don't suggest people are making things up from times before their birth simply because you have a different view.

> Sure, paper is white, but it's not glowing white

It‘s your fault if you set your display to glowing. My displays, depending on the model, have their brightness setting between zero and thirty.

Zero and thirty what?

And the speakers set to 11?

I guess they meant out of 100, with 100 being the brightest for their screen.

I’m glad those brightness settings work for you but I can’t deal with how dull it makes colors look on traditional backlit displays. The reduced contrast also isn’t very fun with modern UIs which for some reason actively avoid good contrast.

windows originated very little: plenty of type-on-page metaphor predated it.

original was light mode: printer terminals. yes, green-on-black became normal in the mid seventies, and some amber-on-black. but even early lisp machines, the Alto, Smalltalk, W/X/Andrew interfaces, Next, etc - type-on-page, not serial-terminal-ish dark mode.

Beside it not being true for paper it's also not true for electronic screens. Before a computer with CRT most of us had some simpler screens on calculators or other devices that were LCDs. And they are blackish on some lighter gray or green - light mode.

In a darkened room I adjusted my first amber monochrome monitor for low contrast and brightness. Wow that was great! I thought.

It was similar to what the author of the article prefers to dark mode: not-too-bright text on not-too-dark a background.

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