Ask HN: Why is free space pink colored?

Probably a Microsoft programmer once wrote a line like this as a placeholder so he could get something on screen:

fillColor = (used) ? 0x0000ff : 0xff00c0;

And then he got an emergency assignment to fix an obscure SQL Server bug related to NTFS extended attributes, and "fillColor" was never touched again.

is it 0xff00c0 ?

On my windows machine here its either

0xff00ff or 0x0000ff

Eventually he was just lazy and had no color palette ready?

Ok, lets go back first IBM standard graphics mode ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Graphics_Adapter ) had a limited palette which was black, light cyan, light magenta and white. maybe they were being backwards compatible.

Seems as logical as any other theory

I know that purple is very close to invisible lights. Maybe that's the reason. Purple, invisible, nothing.