Show HN: Desktopcolors.com – A museum for solid background colors of classic OS

vvlowrian about 6 hours ago 29 commentsRead Article on desktopcolors.com

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Hi HN, in my last vacation, I built desktopcolors.com as a place to collect iconic solid background colors. Let me know what you think.

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Discussion (29 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

danirod•about 3 hours ago

One nerdy detail about old operating systems and graphics cards: due to the way the VGA color palette works, the teal background used in Windows 98 and earlier versions of Windows was actually lighter than #008080 if the computer was configured to use 16 colors (not 256 colors):

https://twitter.com/bakertechsrvcs/status/162629846037367193...

https://xcancel.com/bakertechsrvcs/status/162629846037367193...

Another nerdy detail: the default background color on Windows XP was different depending on whether the theme was Luna or Classic. On Classic it is the same one as Windows 2000, but for Luna it is more blueish. I understand the denial, but it will be the 25st anniversary of the XP release in a few months, so it probably qualifies as classic by now.

flowercalled•about 3 hours ago

I can understand using an llm to build your website. But I can't understand using it to write copy, especially when it's so unnecessary here.

rideontime•about 2 hours ago

Seconded. The "personality" it tries to add is trite and tiresome and everybody immediately sees it for what it is, especially for a case like this where there's only so many ways to say "this is the default desktop color of an operating system." Not only that, but it's confusing - is "Windows Classic blue" a real thing, or just an attempt at a cute phrase? Just label the colors and be done with it.

scrumper•17 minutes ago

Huh, I do not remember Windows 1.0 being that shade of green but screenshots confirm what's here.

torh•about 2 hours ago

My favorite was the blue in Windows 2000. Never cared much for the green in Windows 95/98. When installing Windows 98 later (because games) I would try to set up the same blue. Instead of getting it correct, I guessed, and ended up with #336699 which was easy to remember and "close enough". I see now that it's closer to Haiku (almost perfect, #336698) than Windows 2000.

cosmic_cheese•about 1 hour ago

Same. The lighter gray 2000 uses compared to 9x is also much more pleasant.

It might sound ridiculous but using 9x with the default theme felt a bit depressing. It summons thoughts of being stuck in a building with that awful fluorescent overhead lighting on a day where it’s dark and dreary outside.

2000 on the other hand is about as refreshing as a gray 3D beveled OS theme can look, on par with Mac OS platinum AND maybe slightly edged out by the bright colorful sunny tab titlebars of BeOS.

voodooEntity•26 minutes ago

No os² feel like this list should have gotten more entries and love before publishing

drybjed•42 minutes ago

First I looked for was Atari 1040 STE TOS green background, and it's not there. Bummer.

cryo32•about 1 hour ago

This is great. I've been meaning to work out what windows NT background colour is for years. My desktop now is solid that :)

tuzemec•about 2 hours ago

For the past 20+ years I'm using the same desktop color across various OSes: #000000 This is one of the first things that I modify on a fresh install.

HelloUsername•about 2 hours ago

Funny thing:

"Windows 7 boots slower if you set a solid background color" 28.jan.2025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42856262 117 comments

"Why did Windows 7 log on slower for months if you had a solid color background?" 28.apr.2025 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43827214 296 comments

_joel•about 2 hours ago

It's strange how seeing the default NT4 and 2k colours take me straight back to a fresh install 25+ years ago. First job was doing desktop rollouts so I'd see it a lot!

lucideer•about 2 hours ago

Windows 2008 is the teal desktop I remember fondly - they brought it back after going blue in Windows 2003. I'm presuming it was the same #008080 shade as '95 & '98.

zebproj•about 2 hours ago

There's no "Hot Dog Stand", so the collection is incomplete.

vlowrian•about 2 hours ago

There is :) https://desktopcolors.com/os/windows-3-1/ffff00

vivid242•about 3 hours ago

I sometimes catch myself recreating the Win95 color on my Mac. Thanks for this!

wewewedxfgdf•about 3 hours ago

I still love the Amiga colors.

vlowrian•about 3 hours ago

Me too! The Workbench Blue is actually my current desktop background :)

newsomix9xl•about 2 hours ago

Where's plan9?

rcarmo•about 2 hours ago

Delightful, even if I don’t recall Solaris

iAMkenough•about 2 hours ago

OS X Aqua Blue!

imfemambocus•about 2 hours ago

The one thing I would add to each swatch is where the number came from. A value read out of a palette table and a value sampled from a screenshot are not the same number, and the difference is invisible.

I ran into this today on something unrelated. A page painted #0b0d14, and macOS screencapture wrote rgb(8,13,16) into the file, because the capture lands in the display's colour space rather than sRGB. Handing that same hex to a video encoder gave a third answer, rgb(9,11,17), this time from the yuv conversion. I had to ask for #0a0f13 to get back the value the page had actually painted.

So any swatch sampled from a screenshot of a running install is drifted by a few levels, silently, and a CRT is a further step away again. One line per entry saying "documented VGA palette" or "sampled from a VM" would make this citable rather than just lovely to scroll, and it would settle the Windows 98 teal question in the sibling comment.