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):
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.
I always liked the feeling of getting a proper video driver installed and unlocking "true color" support, the desktop background and icons were suddenly much richer and saturated.
I remember that good feeling when getting a new windows 9x machine up and running or installing a new video card, updating the graphics driver to get the display into 16M colors, and enjoying the darker teal. The color itself felt like an upgrade. When that brighter teal appeared you knew you didn't have the driver set, even before seeing any icons.
Man, I wish I could have the 90s back. I absolutely despise where we went with tech in the past decade. I suppose that's a me problem.
I'm with you, the 90s were cool, especially early computing days when things were equally quirky and equally magical.
On that graphics drivers note, I recall some video drivers were just so bad back then you might not get the full colors or resolution depending on your setup. Or some games might just look weird. But there was a cool thirdparty driver called UniVBE from SciTech[1] that you could install for almost any card and suddenly everything looked and worked so much more better, it was like magic. It was one of the go-to utilities I'd always carry around with me in my bag of floppy disks, full of unique, wonderous tools that the world has probably forgotten by now.
The top-right (16 color) version gives me a "safe mode" tingly sensation :) I didn't know about the Luna/Classic distinction - I guess you don't usually see the Luna color since it's hidden behind Bliss.
Noted. Plan9/Rio was actually on my list for the initial release, but it is currently broken in the Virtual OS Museum (https://virtualosmuseum.org/) and I couldn't find any other reliable sources.
But it's still on the todo list and I've also added NeXTSTEP.
Agreed. A bit of context on that: I wanted to add some fun facts or relevant information to some of the colors, OSs, etc. and I wrote this in German and let the LLM do the translation. However,it looked pretty weird when navigating through the page and most colors and roughly half of the OSs did show up with an empty label. So it was a visual decision to let the LLM fill in the gaps.
But you're right. It's damaging to the actual facts and research I added myself. It might be better to remove the text where it's just an LLM placeholder.
Larger copies (like about and privacy) are written by me and then LLM translated.
The LLM descriptions are terrible though :) here's the one for Windows 98:
> Windows 98 refined the 95 formula, folding the web into the shell with Active Desktop while keeping the familiar look. Its Display Properties carried over the same grid of basic swatches and named schemes — teal still the Windows Standard default — with the classic reserved system colors tuned to their canonical values.
Instead of this, maybe find some copy related to the os (some quotes from the media / internet archive / something)?
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.
It's actually not so easy to pick a speaking name for each color, since many colors are used in different OSs. I tried to use neutral and standard color names were they exist. Things like Windows Classic blue are probably always description-slop, though.
Another user suggested to use media quotes etc. on OSs, which I think is actually a pretty good idea. I might swap the LLM generated placeholders for something like that.
Understandable, and "Windows Classic blue" might not be useless if it had a function - let the user filter down to the OSes that shared a given color, so that the reason for it being named such is more clear.
You can see all OSs using the same color on the details page. It's the "known uses" box below the preview. Click on "View all x palettes" to see the full list.
In many cases, there is some additional information I want to add, like which themes the colors were used as background color in, or which palette they come from if there are several different.
I also discovered a lot about the different OSs while researching the colors and I think it's a nice nod towards the museum character of the site to add fun/nerd facts when I stumble upon them.
But true, in many cases there is no need for text - I just removed the tagline which didn't add anything useful.
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.
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 conjures images 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.
Windows 2000 is the epitome of Windows UI to me, probably because my first PC had Me which borrowed the desktop from it. As i kid I didn't even notice it was different from the 98 machines at school, but when i set up 98SE for retro gaming as an adult I couldn't shake this "something isn't quite how i remember" feeling.
Then i set up 2000 as a server for the retro machines and everything clicked. Kind of amazing how many control panels in Windows 10 and 11 are essentially unchanged from 2000
I agree, the color was great, and also in general Windows 2000 was very good. I used both the desktop and server versions for years. After that Windows XP made me switch to Linux. Since then I've only really used Debian and Mac OS.
I recently tried installing Windows 11 on a PC to run some games. The contrast with Windows 2000 is crazy, what a mess. Even just the control panel has three different UI frameworks mixed in one application. The whole thing is slow on a modern CPU with 64gb ram.
How did they get from Windows 2000 which arguably may have been ahead of Linux in terms of kernel and at least on par if not better than Mac OS in terms of UX to todays version of Windows 11?
It’s a long, desperate and complicated tale as the Windows team, frightened by their own shadows, attempted to head off any and all possible competition. From web views to tablet interfaces and every other mistake you can see the legacy of it in windows 11. The tablet/touch screen panic also affected Linux as well but at least most of the worst of that has been fixed.
When I get jobs to work on older systems I get a visceral sick feeling whenever the server version of windows with the touch screen interface comes up in RDP. Hideous and useless.
Win2k was easily the best thing they ever did. Every version of server since then has pushed admins to linux
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.
You're right. This also came up in other comments. I just removed pretty much all AI placeholder texts or descriptors or replaced them with "hand-written" content, where I found additional context helpful or interesting.
Thanks! I didn't use any screenshots as sources, because I a) wanted to scrape all possible options, b) want to make sure the default is really what you would get after a fresh install and c) was afraid that a screenshot might introduce some kind of color drift, compared to the original value the OS defines.
I mostly used things like the fantastic Virtual OS Museum (https://virtualosmuseum.org/), run-in-browser VMs like PCJs Machines (https://www.pcjs.org/blog/2015/09/21/) or real installations inside a VM. I tried to avoid using Color Pickers etc. and read the actual value from the OS somehow (e.g. copy the HEX value shown in the UI), but in some cases, I had to go with the macOS Digital Colour Meter (set to sRGB).
Nice one, travelled back in time a bit. One thing that was unexpected for me is when you hover on the circles in the Known Uses section of a color, I expeceted that the given OS will be shown as a tooltip (maybe also clickable) and I don't need to click on the "View all X palettes" link. But lovely idea, thanks for sharing.
Ah, I can see! The dots mark years (not OSs) since multiple OSs might use the same color in the same release year. However, you're totally right: the tooltip is dearly missing since it would make just that obvious - and also a default action when clicking a dot.
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.
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!
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.
AFAIK, the actual color was highly dependent on the hardware used (e.g. video adapter, CRT, etc.). That's why photographs of a Windows 1.0 screen might look vastly different.
The color I listed is what Windows outputs on the software side. It's pretty much an EGA dither of bright cyan and bright green. It's what you would get with todays hardware.
Interestingly, none of the screenshots I can find show the dithering that the article talks about, and all the contemporary photographs of monitors show a less green blue background. I think maybe something is being lost in emulation?
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!
I was pretty surprised at how I both immediately recognized each desktop color, but also how each of them "felt". I could picture the icons and menus in my mind, and their location (left, right, top, bottom) and knew how the mouse would respond as well.
I suspect there's some sort of strong association going on with color and tool use in our monkey brains.
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.
“In most computer display systems, images are encoded with a gamma of about 0.45 and decoded with the reciprocal gamma of 2.2. A notable exception, until the release of Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) in September 2009, were Macintosh computers, which encoded with a gamma of 0.55 and decoded with a gamma of 1.8”
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.
I always liked the feeling of getting a proper video driver installed and unlocking "true color" support, the desktop background and icons were suddenly much richer and saturated.
I remember that good feeling when getting a new windows 9x machine up and running or installing a new video card, updating the graphics driver to get the display into 16M colors, and enjoying the darker teal. The color itself felt like an upgrade. When that brighter teal appeared you knew you didn't have the driver set, even before seeing any icons.
Man, I wish I could have the 90s back. I absolutely despise where we went with tech in the past decade. I suppose that's a me problem.
I'm with you, the 90s were cool, especially early computing days when things were equally quirky and equally magical.
On that graphics drivers note, I recall some video drivers were just so bad back then you might not get the full colors or resolution depending on your setup. Or some games might just look weird. But there was a cool thirdparty driver called UniVBE from SciTech[1] that you could install for almost any card and suddenly everything looked and worked so much more better, it was like magic. It was one of the go-to utilities I'd always carry around with me in my bag of floppy disks, full of unique, wonderous tools that the world has probably forgotten by now.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UniVBE
That's cool, thanks for sharing. I like the idea of adding XP as an anniversary gift ;)
The top-right (16 color) version gives me a "safe mode" tingly sensation :) I didn't know about the Luna/Classic distinction - I guess you don't usually see the Luna color since it's hidden behind Bliss.
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...
Noted. Plan9/Rio was actually on my list for the initial release, but it is currently broken in the Virtual OS Museum (https://virtualosmuseum.org/) and I couldn't find any other reliable sources.
But it's still on the todo list and I've also added NeXTSTEP.
I always loved that purple/slate blue colour of WindowMaker/GNUStep/NeXTSTEP.
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.
Agreed. A bit of context on that: I wanted to add some fun facts or relevant information to some of the colors, OSs, etc. and I wrote this in German and let the LLM do the translation. However,it looked pretty weird when navigating through the page and most colors and roughly half of the OSs did show up with an empty label. So it was a visual decision to let the LLM fill in the gaps.
But you're right. It's damaging to the actual facts and research I added myself. It might be better to remove the text where it's just an LLM placeholder.
Larger copies (like about and privacy) are written by me and then LLM translated.
I like the website, great work!
The LLM descriptions are terrible though :) here's the one for Windows 98:
> Windows 98 refined the 95 formula, folding the web into the shell with Active Desktop while keeping the familiar look. Its Display Properties carried over the same grid of basic swatches and named schemes — teal still the Windows Standard default — with the classic reserved system colors tuned to their canonical values.
Instead of this, maybe find some copy related to the os (some quotes from the media / internet archive / something)?
That's actually a pretty cool idea, noted. Thanks!
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.
It's actually not so easy to pick a speaking name for each color, since many colors are used in different OSs. I tried to use neutral and standard color names were they exist. Things like Windows Classic blue are probably always description-slop, though.
Another user suggested to use media quotes etc. on OSs, which I think is actually a pretty good idea. I might swap the LLM generated placeholders for something like that.
Understandable, and "Windows Classic blue" might not be useless if it had a function - let the user filter down to the OSes that shared a given color, so that the reason for it being named such is more clear.
You can see all OSs using the same color on the details page. It's the "known uses" box below the preview. Click on "View all x palettes" to see the full list.
Is that what you meant?
Why do you even need the text? Just show the color, year and the name of the OS.
In many cases, there is some additional information I want to add, like which themes the colors were used as background color in, or which palette they come from if there are several different.
I also discovered a lot about the different OSs while researching the colors and I think it's a nice nod towards the museum character of the site to add fun/nerd facts when I stumble upon them.
But true, in many cases there is no need for text - I just removed the tagline which didn't add anything useful.
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.
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 conjures images 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.
Windows 2000 is the epitome of Windows UI to me, probably because my first PC had Me which borrowed the desktop from it. As i kid I didn't even notice it was different from the 98 machines at school, but when i set up 98SE for retro gaming as an adult I couldn't shake this "something isn't quite how i remember" feeling.
Then i set up 2000 as a server for the retro machines and everything clicked. Kind of amazing how many control panels in Windows 10 and 11 are essentially unchanged from 2000
I agree, the color was great, and also in general Windows 2000 was very good. I used both the desktop and server versions for years. After that Windows XP made me switch to Linux. Since then I've only really used Debian and Mac OS.
I recently tried installing Windows 11 on a PC to run some games. The contrast with Windows 2000 is crazy, what a mess. Even just the control panel has three different UI frameworks mixed in one application. The whole thing is slow on a modern CPU with 64gb ram.
How did they get from Windows 2000 which arguably may have been ahead of Linux in terms of kernel and at least on par if not better than Mac OS in terms of UX to todays version of Windows 11?
It’s a long, desperate and complicated tale as the Windows team, frightened by their own shadows, attempted to head off any and all possible competition. From web views to tablet interfaces and every other mistake you can see the legacy of it in windows 11. The tablet/touch screen panic also affected Linux as well but at least most of the worst of that has been fixed.
When I get jobs to work on older systems I get a visceral sick feeling whenever the server version of windows with the touch screen interface comes up in RDP. Hideous and useless.
Win2k was easily the best thing they ever did. Every version of server since then has pushed admins to linux
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.
You're right. This also came up in other comments. I just removed pretty much all AI placeholder texts or descriptors or replaced them with "hand-written" content, where I found additional context helpful or interesting.
What is a load bearing phrase here?
It's a joke, Claude AI calls everything load bearing. Once you see it it cannot be unseen.
Nice. Will keep a lookout!
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.
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?
Thanks! I didn't use any screenshots as sources, because I a) wanted to scrape all possible options, b) want to make sure the default is really what you would get after a fresh install and c) was afraid that a screenshot might introduce some kind of color drift, compared to the original value the OS defines.
I mostly used things like the fantastic Virtual OS Museum (https://virtualosmuseum.org/), run-in-browser VMs like PCJs Machines (https://www.pcjs.org/blog/2015/09/21/) or real installations inside a VM. I tried to avoid using Color Pickers etc. and read the actual value from the OS somehow (e.g. copy the HEX value shown in the UI), but in some cases, I had to go with the macOS Digital Colour Meter (set to sRGB).
Nice one, travelled back in time a bit. One thing that was unexpected for me is when you hover on the circles in the Known Uses section of a color, I expeceted that the given OS will be shown as a tooltip (maybe also clickable) and I don't need to click on the "View all X palettes" link. But lovely idea, thanks for sharing.
Ah, I can see! The dots mark years (not OSs) since multiple OSs might use the same color in the same release year. However, you're totally right: the tooltip is dearly missing since it would make just that obvious - and also a default action when clicking a dot.
something like： https://stylespark.dev/
You forgot the most iconic backgroud: #000000, MS DOS.
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.
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!
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.
Update: I went into the source code and found the colors I was fond of. I didn't care for the red but I'm including it for completeness
Grey: #aaaaaa Green: #77aa77 Purple: #9077aa Blue: #7790aa Red: #aa5555
Source: https://github.com/bradleythughes/blackbox/tree/master/data/...
Added, along with all other styles featuring solid color backgrounds :) https://desktopcolors.com/os/blackbox
I agree, Blackbox is still one of the WMs on my wishlist.
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.
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
This isn't a "desktop," but C64's dark blue background appears to be #403285. That was the color of my very early childhood.
This is great. I've been meaning to work out what windows NT background colour is for years. My desktop now is solid that :)
BleskOS's color seems... offensive. Perhaps they don't want people living on their desktop.
Solaris 9 and Haiku OS are the tops.
Huh, I do not remember Windows 1.0 being that shade of green but screenshots confirm what's here.
AFAIK, the actual color was highly dependent on the hardware used (e.g. video adapter, CRT, etc.). That's why photographs of a Windows 1.0 screen might look vastly different.
The color I listed is what Windows outputs on the software side. It's pretty much an EGA dither of bright cyan and bright green. It's what you would get with todays hardware.
Interestingly, none of the screenshots I can find show the dithering that the article talks about, and all the contemporary photographs of monitors show a less green blue background. I think maybe something is being lost in emulation?
It probably looked much less neon bright on the displays of the time. Same for Windows 2.0.
First I looked for was Atari 1040 STE TOS green background, and it's not there. Bummer.
No os² feel like this list should have gotten more entries and love before publishing
I still love the Amiga colors.
Me too! The Workbench Blue is actually my current desktop background :)
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!
Oh wow, I never used OpenWindows and I just googled it. I definitely need that in the collection! Noted :)
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.
There is :) https://desktopcolors.com/os/windows-3-1/ffff00
I can't even describe how many spots this hit for me.
I was pretty surprised at how I both immediately recognized each desktop color, but also how each of them "felt". I could picture the icons and menus in my mind, and their location (left, right, top, bottom) and knew how the mouse would respond as well.
I suspect there's some sort of strong association going on with color and tool use in our monkey brains.
Where are the 8-bit systems? Not all of them were black.
I feel old when I realize that I have used most of them!
Where's plan9?
Exactly!
Delightful, even if I don’t recall Solaris
OS X Aqua Blue!
45 110 145
My desktop color since win2k until today
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
DOS #000000
nice
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.
The Mac also ran with a different gamma correction. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamma_correction#Computer_disp...:
“In most computer display systems, images are encoded with a gamma of about 0.45 and decoded with the reciprocal gamma of 2.2. A notable exception, until the release of Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) in September 2009, were Macintosh computers, which encoded with a gamma of 0.55 and decoded with a gamma of 1.8”