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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.

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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.

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