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

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.

Some overlooked iconic backgrounds/color-schemes for me:

NeXTSTEP: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeXTSTEP#/media/File:NeXTSTEP_...

Plan9/Rio: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plan_9_from_Bell_Labs#/media/F...

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.

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.

Wow, cool idea! Where did you get all the information from? Did you pick the color schemes by analyzing all the images you found on the web?

You forgot the most iconic backgroud: #000000, MS DOS.

The descriptions under the colors are very obviously LLM generated and make little sense. No human would make statements like what is written under each entry. Contains many LLM-isms like em-dashes, loaded words, and load-bearing phrases (emphasis intended). Consider removing or rewriting those bits.

It's often said that scent is tightly associated with memory, but simply looking at these colors sends me on multiple trips down memory lane.

I second the post from imfemambocus on color-sampling provenance. It would be useful to know the exact source for each.

love it. Would love to see the grey/orange/blue/dark pink of CDE from the late 90s. But I'd especially love the gray on mottled gray of 1995 vintage Sun OpenWindows!

When I was just getting into Linux and trying out all the random window managers, I found that I really liked the hues of green and purple that Blackbox came with.

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.

This isn't a "desktop," but C64's dark blue background appears to be #403285. That was the color of my very early childhood.

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!

BleskOS's color seems... offensive. Perhaps they don't want people living on their desktop.

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.

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

Where are the 8-bit systems? Not all of them were black.

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

I feel old when I realize that I have used most of them!

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

I can't even describe how many spots this hit for me.

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

I still love the Amiga colors.

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

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

Solaris 9 and Haiku OS are the tops.

Where's plan9?

Delightful, even if I don’t recall Solaris

45 110 145

My desktop color since win2k until today

OS X Aqua Blue!

DOS #000000

I like the colors but I'm personally getting very sick of every single website using That One Font Claude Likes for everything.

I think the mono is IBM Plex? Idk what the other one is, but I'll be looking it up so as to be certain i never use it in my projects lol

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.