From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on inbox.vuxu.org X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-0.8 required=5.0 tests=DKIM_INVALID,DKIM_SIGNED, HTML_FONT_LOW_CONTRAST,HTML_MESSAGE,MAILING_LIST_MULTI, T_SCC_BODY_TEXT_LINE autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 Received: (qmail 26546 invoked from network); 16 Jun 2023 16:52:18 -0000 Received: from minnie.tuhs.org (2600:3c01:e000:146::1) by inbox.vuxu.org with ESMTPUTF8; 16 Jun 2023 16:52:18 -0000 Received: from minnie.tuhs.org (localhost [IPv6:::1]) by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 9B148425B1; Sat, 17 Jun 2023 02:52:16 +1000 (AEST) Received: from mail-vk1-xa31.google.com (mail-vk1-xa31.google.com [IPv6:2607:f8b0:4864:20::a31]) by minnie.tuhs.org (Postfix) with ESMTPS id 46BFF425AE for ; Sat, 17 Jun 2023 02:52:09 +1000 (AEST) Received: by mail-vk1-xa31.google.com with SMTP id 71dfb90a1353d-4715cbe0422so162241e0c.3 for ; Fri, 16 Jun 2023 09:52:09 -0700 (PDT) DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=ccc.com; s=google; t=1686934328; x=1689526328; h=cc:to:subject:message-id:date:from:in-reply-to:references :mime-version:from:to:cc:subject:date:message-id:reply-to; bh=rrT9bC5q3zA+RQmP8DlHUk2KL5BEoh8gxRrt64/vA0c=; b=HIFJdzNhvtT/vh37HRjFL6PH0SBEmgh2t/TKjhGrFEbPgi/LBlxuFytO8SUhIse9JR RiR3kjviWGBRZ04Y+hnLzZrjp8aFm33frrmbvSVdBIBnVzHWAxr6X4FQrs6FSMApiLQF 4SmjA3px5/QS5tUDnqQkFMq8Vmling5zpL23Y= X-Google-DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=1e100.net; s=20221208; t=1686934328; x=1689526328; h=cc:to:subject:message-id:date:from:in-reply-to:references :mime-version:x-gm-message-state:from:to:cc:subject:date:message-id :reply-to; bh=rrT9bC5q3zA+RQmP8DlHUk2KL5BEoh8gxRrt64/vA0c=; b=g4w8I6gIaa6SJUmyl8XoOurKKkdjcxq+2vJGQJwE34/ztBMmcCAhXnA5lIkyq1CI0p 2hjR2hHPOVfXuljkmDmKu3a6XygfqS++tRpjC/0z+XNf+9wVxU/L+P+9c0mQ8Fj2jKAz /YskZcy1g6/UHweTF41PESvwx3OCkPGi7dKRhXTOc+ICe706Dqi91Nqk1QEFsCwqJt8D gahhQwC5nR1FLQFBdLT07L8swxj50naDKqNOAw9Mn9qVrMKAwbj8ckXyCTy9yi+5TjgD BJiLpiFwzo2ns7yzYMzpojLqM5QB/vq3p3qRSGJXqBgHV2ER8kMFJy+SUJdiGoDZBPfm xM3Q== X-Gm-Message-State: AC+VfDyjNkQRSVe3aswwPRnGWLXMgPouE5AkizjQKUhOmfood+87cS4D 7xvs4g5u+2ksvRMn/BepkWIjPo17advjjBVzb8pvYYUlK4cOphmChAjOPg== X-Google-Smtp-Source: ACHHUZ642ziEV5l60gJgEUHWrtINapfF1hopng1AwaZGQA+i7eaaEDg29TgrlH9A/rdNh0NkY99loHOBD1/sOhyVjlQ= X-Received: by 2002:a1f:3d50:0:b0:471:5506:2d85 with SMTP id k77-20020a1f3d50000000b0047155062d85mr1225610vka.5.1686934327480; Fri, 16 Jun 2023 09:52:07 -0700 (PDT) MIME-Version: 1.0 References: In-Reply-To: From: Clem Cole Date: Fri, 16 Jun 2023 12:51:41 -0400 Message-ID: To: segaloco Content-Type: multipart/alternative; boundary="000000000000596d7705fe4201a1" Message-ID-Hash: XKZCZTLAT4OKQHYPV3FRE2XYRE6VZJJW X-Message-ID-Hash: XKZCZTLAT4OKQHYPV3FRE2XYRE6VZJJW X-MailFrom: clemc@ccc.com X-Mailman-Rule-Misses: dmarc-mitigation; no-senders; approved; emergency; loop; banned-address; member-moderation; nonmember-moderation; administrivia; implicit-dest; max-recipients; max-size; news-moderation; no-subject; digests; suspicious-header CC: COFF X-Mailman-Version: 3.3.6b1 Precedence: list Subject: [COFF] Re: White Backgrounds on GUIs after Dark Backgrounds on Terminals? List-Id: Computer Old Farts Forum Archived-At: List-Archive: List-Help: List-Owner: List-Post: List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: --000000000000596d7705fe4201a1 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="UTF-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Matt, I take a small stab at this. Like most of us, I don't know the exact reason, but having lived the time, I'll point out a few things. 1.) At the start (60s and 70s), I suspect that economics drove light pixels on dark backgrounds as the high-order bit. 2.) Xerox PARC developed Alto was driven by their research in the Electronic Office -- remember Xerox made its money selling coping >>paper<<. The black-on-white was a specific choice by their researcher as they tried to convince their management of the idea. 3.) High-resolution monitors were costly until the late 1980s (regardless of BW or Color) 4.) Early phosphors tubes suffered from burn, so turning on display "pixels" for long times was bad. That said, TV was constantly changing so it was less of an issue for them, but not for terminals where the dots were the same part of the screen over and over. 5.) "Glass Terminal" designed until the later 1970s were SSI/MSI TTL, with few if any VLSI except for maybe the WD1402A UART 6.) Memory costs per bit compared to today are still high. Remember in 1980, when the CMU "SPICE" proposal came out for the infamous 3M system, we priced the cost of 1MByte of memory (only) which it needed (using Tektronix's volume pricing) at > $3K [BTW: this was the same year that Jake Grimes stood on a take at the Asilomar Microprocessor Workshop and declared memory as being "free" - and compared just a few years previous -- it was]. I observe a few things with those points as a place to start. If you look at the early "glass ttys" like the DEC VT05 and even later the LSI ADM3A - there is nary a microprocessor inside. It's a huge board with lots of TTL [the ADM 3A often came as a kit - you had to solder them yourself]. The other thing to remember, in those days, NTSC in the US and PAL in Europe for TVs was the primary driver for CRTs. So if you were making a display, you had to at least buy the tube from one of a small number of tube manufacturers [IIRC Phillps in the EU was the leader, and GE, RCA, and Raytheon fought it out in the US -- Sony would come later] - (I'm also not sure Magnovox made its own tubes). For instance, I believe DEC bought the tube for the VT05 from Raytheon; who made them locally ??Lowell, MA maybe?? and continued for a while [maybe even through the VT-100]. So remember, for a 25x80 terminal -- that's 2KBytes of memory just for the video [without "attributes"]. So that's also big. IIRC, the VT05, and ADM 3A used early Intel 1103 1Kx1 DRAM. So the eight memory chips are the highest cost part of the logic board. Because of the design, I suspect the turn-on-the-beam logic for a 'dot time" was all the designers cared about. Light on dark fell out of the ease of design, and they had limited BW on the tubes. Even with that, I believe the VT05 was in the $3-5K range in the late 1960s when it was sold for the PDP-8 or the like. I remember in the late 1970s when the $1K glass TTY (the cost of the ADM 3A kit) or the Pekin Elmer "Fox" terminals appeared. So between tubes and logic, it took at least ten years to drive the price down by a factor of 3-5. My friend and former cubical mate at Tektronix, Roger Bates designed the display in the Alto [side tidbit - he has the patent on the loadable curser - which was initially a martini glass, not an hourglass to show time]. Roger told me the monitor they used was a "special order" and was fairly expensive. But it was a definite choice to do black on white -- they wanted to represent paper. FWIW: a great deal of the monitor logic is done in microcode [the infamous BITBLT being an example] because they were already logic constrained. He and Thacker were using huge boards for the processor, and it was all SSI/MSI. *I think it's safe to suggest that Xerox was where the idea/first use of dark on light began.* FWIW, in 1979/80, when he and I were working on Magnolia at Tektronix, Roger had to get the tube from the Sony/Tektronix folks -- it was a special order. Tek itself did not make one that was high enough BW. Roger had just finished designing the 3D frame buffer for Teklabs and had used a Sony/Tek Trinitron color tube in that system - which I remember was one of the most expensive parts of the FB. Roger used its BW cousin for Magnolia, which was cheaper, but the tube and hard disk were the two most expensive parts in Magnolia. Roll the clock forward only 2-5 years. When Apollo, Masscomp, and later Sun started to make workstations, there tended to be three types of display -- a low-resolution BW, a 'paper white" high resolution, and eventually a color tube. Also in the late 70s, Motorola created the 6845 video chip, which along with a micro such as a 6502/6800/Z80, became the de jure standard for most terminals. It. and 8 2102's SRAM chips, and you had a simple (white on dark) display that worked with low-end tubes. Also, the displays were pretty expensive when IBM released the first VGA for its PC/AT. It took the VGA market taken off to start to drive the cost of the monitors down. But anything over 12-15 inches was still pretty expensive, and you needed VRAM to drive it, *etc*. My point is that Black on White does not take off with hockey stick-style growth until after the "workstations." FWIW: the 1980s Mac original display is small and not extremely high resolution compared to what would quickly come to expect. So while people liked the Xerox idea of blank on white, it was not economical. I personally did not get to start using the 'paper' paradigm until the time of the Sun-3 and like (~1985/6). As an engineer, I also remember having the default display resolution - we had more program memory, *etc*., but the tech writer would get a high-end black and white because they were working with text [*i.e*., Framemaker pages] for documents. It was in the mid-1990s that having a solid color display with high resolution became the default. But the cost of the silicon to drive it had to come down, and the market for high-end displays needed to appear. BTW: what happened? LCD came out --- why it used Silicon manufacturing techniques. So once it was perfected, the ability to make a high BW display quickly overtook the analog tube schemes. As for the current light on dark, I wonder if this is just a new set of engineers making their mark. I'm sure it's better. The cost is the same, so now it's just marketing and a way to show off being different - *e.g.*, new/cool. =E1=90=A7 On Thu, Jun 15, 2023 at 4:56=E2=80=AFPM segaloco via COFF w= rote: > Good afternoon everyone. I've been thinking about the color/contrast > landscape of computing today and have a bit of a nebulous quandary that I > wonder if anyone would have some insight on. > > So terminals, they started as typewriters with extra steps, a white piece > of paper on a reel being stamped with dark ink to provide feedback from t= he > machine. When video terminals hit the market, the display was a black > screen with white, orange, green, or whatever other color of phosphor the= y > bothered to smear on the surface of the tube. Presumably this display sty= le > was chosen as on a CRT, you're only lighting phosphor where there is > actually an image, unlike the LCD screens of today. So there was a comple= te > contrast shift from dark letters on white paper to light letters on an > otherwise unlit pane of glass. > > Step forward to graphical systems and windows on the Alto? Light > background with dark text. > Windows on the Macintosh? Light background with dark text. > Windows on MS Windows? Light backgrounds with dark text. > Default HTML rendering in browsers? Light backgrounds with dark text. > > Fast forward to today, and it seems that dark themes are all the rage, > light characters on an otherwise dark background. This would've made so > much sense during the CRT era as every part of the screen representing a > black pixel is getting no drawing, but when CRTs were king, the predomina= nt > visual style was dark on light, like a piece of paper, rather than light = on > dark, like a video terminal. Now in the day and age of LCDs, where every > pixel is on regardless, now we're finally flipping the script and putting > light characters on dark backgrounds, long after any hardware benefit (th= at > I'm aware of) would be attained by minimizing the amount of "lit surface" > on the screen. > > Anyone know if this has all been coincidental or if the decision for > graphical user interfaces and such to predominantly use white/light color= s > for backgrounds was a relatively intentional measure around the industry? > Or is it really just that that's how Xerox's system looked and it was all > domino effect after that? At the end of the day I'm really just finding > myself puzzling why computing jumped into the minimalism seen on terminal > screens, keeping from driving CRTs super hard but then when GUIs first > started appearing, they didn't just organically align with what was the > most efficient for a CRT. I recognize this is based largely in subjective > views of how something should look too, so not really expecting a "Person > XYZ authoritatively decided on that GUI elements shall > overwhelmingly only be dark on light", just some thoughts on how we got > going down this path with color schemes in computing. Thanks all! > > - Matt G. > > --000000000000596d7705fe4201a1 Content-Type: text/html; charset="UTF-8" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
Matt,

=C2=A0 I take a small stab a= t this.=C2=A0 Like most of us, I don't know the exact reason, but havin= g lived the time, I'll point out a few things.

1.)= =C2=A0At the start (60s and 70s), I suspect that economics drove light pixe= ls on dark backgrounds as the high-order bit.
2.) Xerox PARC develo= ped Alto was driven by their research in the Electronic Office -- remember = Xerox made its money selling coping >>paper<<. The black-on-whi= te was a specific choice by their researcher as they tried to convince thei= r management of the idea.
3.) High-resolution monitors were costly = until the late 1980s (regardless of BW or Color)
4.) Early phosphor= s tubes suffered from burn, so turning on display=C2=A0"pixels" f= or long times was bad.=C2=A0 =C2=A0That said, TV was constantly changing so= it was less of an issue for them, but not for terminals where the dots wer= e the same part of the screen over and over.
5.) "Glass Te= rminal" designed until the later 1970s were SSI/MSI TTL, with few if a= ny VLSI except for maybe the WD1402A
=C2=A0UART=C2=A0
6.) Memory co= sts per bit compared to today are still high.=C2=A0 Remember in 1980, when = the CMU "SPICE" proposal came out for the infamous 3M system, we = priced the cost of 1MByte of memory (only) which it needed (using Tektronix= 's=C2=A0volume pricing) at > $3K [BTW: this was the same year that J= ake Grimes stood on a take at the Asilomar Microprocessor Workshop and decl= ared memory as being "free" - and compared just a few years previ= ous -- it was].

I observe a few things with those poin= ts as a place to start.=C2=A0 If you look at the early "glass ttys&quo= t; like the DEC VT05 and even later the LSI ADM3A - there is nary a micropr= ocessor inside.=C2=A0 =C2=A0It's a huge=C2=A0board with lots of TTL [th= e ADM 3A often came as a kit - you had to solder them yourself].=C2=A0 The = other thing to remember, in those days, NTSC in the US and PAL in Europe fo= r TVs was the primary driver for CRTs.=C2=A0 =C2=A0So if you were making a = display, you had to at least buy the tube from one of a small number of tub= e manufacturers [IIRC Phillps in the EU was the leader, and GE, RCA, and Ra= ytheon fought it out in the US -- Sony would come later] - (I'm also no= t sure Magnovox=C2=A0made its own tubes).

For instance= , I believe DEC bought the tube for the=C2=A0VT05 from Raytheon; who made= =C2=A0them locally ??Lowell, MA maybe?? and continued for a while [maybe ev= en through the VT-100].=C2=A0=C2=A0

So remember, for a= 25x80 terminal -- that's 2KBytes of memory just for the video [without= "attributes"].=C2=A0 So that's also big.=C2=A0 =C2=A0IIRC, t= he VT05, and ADM 3A used early Intel 1103 1Kx1 DRAM. So the eight memory ch= ips are the highest cost part of the logic board.

Beca= use of the design, I suspect the turn-on-the-beam logic for a 'dot time= " was all the designers cared about.=C2=A0 =C2=A0Light on dark fell ou= t of the ease of design, and they had limited BW on the tubes.=C2=A0 Even w= ith that, I believe the VT05 was in the $3-5K range in the late 1960s when = it was sold for the PDP-8 or the like.=C2=A0 =C2=A0 I remember in the late = 1970s when the $1K glass TTY (the cost of the ADM 3A kit) or the Pekin Elme= r "Fox" terminals appeared.

So between=C2=A0= tubes and=C2=A0logic, it=C2=A0took at least ten years to drive the price do= wn by a factor of 3-5.=C2=A0=C2=A0

My friend and form= er cubical mate at Tektronix, Roger Bates designed the display in the Alto = [side tidbit - he has the patent on the loadable curser=C2=A0- which was in= itially a martini glass, not an hourglass=C2=A0to show time].=C2=A0 =C2=A0R= oger told me the monitor they used was a "special order" and was = fairly expensive.=C2=A0 =C2=A0But it was a definite choice to do black on w= hite -- they wanted to represent paper.=C2=A0 =C2=A0FWIW: a great deal of t= he monitor logic is done in microcode [the infamous BITBLT being an example= ] because they were already logic constrained.=C2=A0 He and Thacker were us= ing huge boards for the processor, and it was all SSI/MSI.

I think it's=C2=A0safe to suggest that Xerox was where the ide= a/first use of dark on light=C2=A0began.

FWIW, i= n 1979/80, when he and I were working on Magnolia at Tektronix, Roger had t= o get the tube from the Sony/Tektronix folks -- it was a special order.=C2= =A0 =C2=A0Tek itself did not make one that was high enough BW.=C2=A0 Roger = had just finished designing the 3D frame buffer for Teklabs and had used a = Sony/Tek Trinitron color tube in that system - which I remember was one of = the most expensive parts of the FB.=C2=A0 Roger used its BW cousin for Magn= olia, which was cheaper, but the tube and hard disk were the two most expen= sive parts in Magnolia.

Roll the clock forward only 2-= 5 years.=C2=A0 When Apollo, Masscomp, and later Sun started to make worksta= tions, there tended to be three types of display -- a low-resolution BW, a = 'paper white" high resolution, and eventually a color tube.=C2=A0 = =C2=A0

Also in the late 70s, Motorola created the 6845= video chip, which along with a micro such as a 6502/6800/Z80, became the d= e jure standard for most terminals.=C2=A0 =C2=A0It. and 8 2102's SRAM c= hips, and you had a simple (white on dark) display that worked with low-end= =C2=A0tubes.

Also, the displays were pretty expensive = when IBM released the first VGA for its=C2=A0PC/AT.=C2=A0 =C2=A0It took the= VGA market taken off to start to drive the cost of the monitors down.=C2= =A0 But anything over 12-15 inches was still pretty expensive, and you need= ed VRAM to drive it, etc.=C2=A0


<= div class=3D"gmail_default" style=3D"font-family:arial,helvetica,sans-serif= ">My point is that Black on White does not take off with hockey stick-style= growth until after the "workstations."=C2=A0 =C2=A0FWIW: the 198= 0s Mac original display is small and not extremely high resolution compared= to what would=C2=A0quickly come to expect.=C2=A0 =C2=A0So while people lik= ed the Xerox idea of blank on white, it was not economical.

I personally did not get to start using the=C2=A0'paper' para= digm until the time of the Sun-3 and like (~1985/6).=C2=A0 As an engineer, = I also remember having the default display resolution - we had more program= memory, etc., but the tech writer would get a high-end black and wh= ite because they were working with text [i.e., Framemaker pages] for= documents.=C2=A0 =C2=A0=C2=A0

It was in the mid-1990s= =C2=A0that having a solid color display with high resolution became the def= ault.=C2=A0 But the cost of the silicon to drive it had to come down, and t= he market for high-end displays needed to appear.

BTW:= =C2=A0 what happened?=C2=A0 LCD came out --- why it used Silicon manufactur= ing techniques.=C2=A0 =C2=A0So once it was perfected, the ability to make a= high BW display quickly overtook the analog tube schemes.


As for the current light on dark, I wonder if this is ju= st a new set of engineers making their mark.=C2=A0 I'm sure it's be= tter.=C2=A0 =C2=A0The cost is the same, so now it's=C2=A0just marketing= and a way to show off being different - e.g., new/cool.
=
3D""=E1=90=A7

On Thu, Jun 15, 2023 at 4:56=E2=80=AFPM segaloco via COF= F <coff@tuhs.org> wrote:
Good afternoon everyon= e. I've been thinking about the color/contrast landscape of computing t= oday and have a bit of a nebulous quandary that I wonder if anyone would ha= ve some insight on.

So terminals, they started as typewrit= ers with extra steps, a white piece of paper on a reel being stamped with d= ark ink to provide feedback from the machine. When video terminals hit the = market, the display was a black screen with white, orange, green, or whatev= er other color of phosphor they bothered to smear on the surface of the tub= e. Presumably this display style was chosen as on a CRT, you're only li= ghting phosphor where there is actually an image, unlike the LCD screens of= today. So there was a complete contrast shift from dark letters on white p= aper to light letters on an otherwise unlit pane of glass.

Step forward to graphical systems and windows on the Alto? Light backgrou= nd with dark text.
Windows on the Macintosh? Light background with da= rk text.
Windows on MS Windows? Light backgrounds with dark text.
Default HTML rendering in browsers? Light backgrounds with dark text.

Fast forward to today, and it seems that dark themes are all= the rage, light characters on an otherwise dark background. This would'= ;ve made so much sense during the CRT era as every part of the screen repre= senting a black pixel is getting no drawing, but when CRTs were king, the p= redominant visual style was dark on light, like a piece of paper, rather th= an light on dark, like a video terminal. Now in the day and age of LCDs, wh= ere every pixel is on regardless, now we're finally flipping the script= and putting light characters on dark backgrounds, long after any hardware = benefit (that I'm aware of) would be attained by minimizing the amount = of "lit surface" on the screen.

Anyone know = if this has all been coincidental or if the decision for graphical user int= erfaces and such to predominantly use white/light colors for backgrounds wa= s a relatively intentional measure around the industry? Or is it really jus= t that that's how Xerox's system looked and it was all domino effec= t after that? At the end of the day I'm really just finding myself puzz= ling why computing jumped into the minimalism seen on terminal screens, kee= ping from driving CRTs super hard but then when GUIs first started appearin= g, they didn't just organically align with what was the most efficient = for a CRT. I recognize this is based largely in subjective views of how som= ething should look too, so not really expecting a "Person XYZ authorit= atively decided on <date> that GUI elements shall overwhelmingly only= be dark on light", just some thoughts on how we got going down this p= ath with color schemes in computing. Thanks all!

= - Matt G.

--000000000000596d7705fe4201a1--