Hacker News Reader

He likely doesn't know. The blue color pre-dates Windows itself, it came from OS/2.

It's the best choice of the colors available in text mode. You can't use the 8 high-intensity colors, that would be nuts. Black wouldn't work, neither would gray. Brown? Red would be obtuse. Green would be odd. Cyan would work as well, I guess. VMware uses purple.

It might also be worth noting that the same color blue was used for the MS-DOS and Windows installers, edit.com, and others.

Why wouldn't black work? Should give visible messages with white text unless I'm missing something.

For one, it would cause users to think they've been dropped back to MS-DOS

You want something that is immediately visually recognizable -- even on a machine you are just walking by -- from any other normal operation, including "sitting displaying something in a full-screen DOS box".

At the time white-on-blue was a pretty common colour scheme.

I remember WordPerfect 5.1. The blue screen gave me headaches and the first thing I did was go into settings to have gray letters on a black background. Shift-F1, if I remember well ;-)