My understanding from past reading was that that change was made because of the observation that at the time, people were generally working with computer representations of paper documents. For ink economy reasons, paper documents were normally dark-on-light. Ink costs something, so normally you’d rather put ink on 5% of the page rather than 95% of the page. If you had a computer showing a light-on-dark image of a document that would be subsequently printed and be dark-on-light on paper, that’d really break the WYSIWYG paradigm emerging at the time. So word processors and the like drove that decision to move to dark-on-light:
Technically, I suppose it wasn’t the Mac where that “dark-on-light-following-paper” convention originated, just where it was popularized. The Apple IIgs had some kind of optional graphical environment that looked like a proto-Mac environment, though I rarely saw it used:
Update: apparently that wasn’t actually released until after the Mac. This says
that that graphical desktop was released in 1985, while the original 128K Mac came out in 1984. So it’s really a dead-end side branch offshoot, rather than a predecessor.
The Mac derived from the Lisa at Apple (which never became very widespread):
But for practical purposes, I think that it’s reasonably fair to say that the Mac was really what spread dark-on-light. Then Windows picked up the convention, and it was really firmly entrenched:
Prior to that, MS-DOS was normally light-on-dark (with the basic command line environment being white-on-black, though with some apps following a convention of light on blue):
When I used VAX/VMS, it was normally off a VT terminal that would have been light-on-dark, normally green, amber, or white on black, depending upon the terminal:
And as far as I can recall, terminals for Unix were light-on-dark.
If you go all the way back before video terminals to teleprinters, those were putting their output directly on paper, so the ink issue comes up again, and they were dark-on-light:
It should be pointed out that modern LCDs use local dimming zones to only light up certain parts of the display, although that only really helps if large swaths of the image are solid black. LCDs have come a long way from the old days when they were side or backlit by CCFLs. So even LCDs might draw slightly less power for light-on-dark, although you’d probably get even more benefit by just turning down the displays brightness regardless of the color scheme.
arandomthought@sh.itjust.works
on 18 Jan 19:35
nextcollapse
Wow that was quite an encyclopedic post. Thank you for the good read!
threaded - newest
Not to mention that the article author apparently likes dark-on-light coloration (“light mode”), whereas I like light-on-dark (“dark mode”).
Traditionally, most computers were light-on-dark. I think it was the Mac that really shifted things to dark-on-light:
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/b0511463-093b-4d5d-8576-fc80f8b13dcb.png">
My understanding from past reading was that that change was made because of the observation that at the time, people were generally working with computer representations of paper documents. For ink economy reasons, paper documents were normally dark-on-light. Ink costs something, so normally you’d rather put ink on 5% of the page rather than 95% of the page. If you had a computer showing a light-on-dark image of a document that would be subsequently printed and be dark-on-light on paper, that’d really break the WYSIWYG paradigm emerging at the time. So word processors and the like drove that decision to move to dark-on-light:
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/ddc6ec2e-ea54-442b-8607-cb6e4c824bd9.png">
Prior to that, a word processor might have looked something like this (WordPerfect for DOS):
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/65d268bb-6371-41a2-90ef-adbdb2f5d5da.png">
Technically, I suppose it wasn’t the Mac where that “dark-on-light-following-paper” convention originated, just where it was popularized. The Apple IIgs had some kind of optional graphical environment that looked like a proto-Mac environment, though I rarely saw it used:
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/1d88a2d5-5e6f-4651-9a03-e719cd1babbd.png">
Update: apparently that wasn’t actually released until after the Mac. This says that that graphical desktop was released in 1985, while the original 128K Mac came out in 1984. So it’s really a dead-end side branch offshoot, rather than a predecessor.
The Mac derived from the Lisa at Apple (which never became very widespread):
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/62b1fe51-c211-45a3-8358-7e32dc7c21dc.jpeg">
And that derived from the Xerox Alto:
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/8de1981f-1570-4f1b-9f6c-6b818a56375e.png">
But for practical purposes, I think that it’s reasonably fair to say that the Mac was really what spread dark-on-light. Then Windows picked up the convention, and it was really firmly entrenched:
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/20518aca-856c-418b-bcee-d6dbc8f6ef3a.png">
Prior to that, MS-DOS was normally light-on-dark (with the basic command line environment being white-on-black, though with some apps following a convention of light on blue):
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/028fb574-44ae-4cbf-a63f-be6d773c7e4e.jpeg">
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/75313441-fc71-4475-b743-3860ddaafb10.jpeg">
Apple ProDOS, widely used on Apple computers prior to the Mac, was light-on-dark:
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/bcd8a9af-8814-47d9-9d14-6c4c1818af31.png">
The same was true of other early text-based PC environments, like the Commodore 64:
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/b2a1917a-06ad-4b82-9dfd-68253fce0503.jpeg">
Or the TRS-80:
<img alt="1000009146" src="https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/82c51867-1027-49aa-8d9f-b48204d6de09.jpeg">
When I used VAX/VMS, it was normally off a VT terminal that would have been light-on-dark, normally green, amber, or white on black, depending upon the terminal:
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/89f562ab-a6b9-4a6e-aab9-c3d448d4be95.jpeg">
And as far as I can recall, terminals for Unix were light-on-dark.
If you go all the way back before video terminals to teleprinters, those were putting their output directly on paper, so the ink issue comes up again, and they were dark-on-light:
<img alt="" src="https://lemmy.today/pictrs/image/d6104e25-15f9-4107-a1f6-dc4e295b1205.jpeg">
But I think that there’s a pretty good argument that, absent ink economy constraints, the historical preference has been to use lig
It should be pointed out that modern LCDs use local dimming zones to only light up certain parts of the display, although that only really helps if large swaths of the image are solid black. LCDs have come a long way from the old days when they were side or backlit by CCFLs. So even LCDs might draw slightly less power for light-on-dark, although you’d probably get even more benefit by just turning down the displays brightness regardless of the color scheme.
Wow that was quite an encyclopedic post. Thank you for the good read!
Superb comment. Well done! Very enjoyable to read and posit about.