Computers used white on black long before they were even able to display black on white. Early CRTs were of a vector type and the background had to be black. I’m just saying that it’s hilarious that this old idea suddenly has a cool marketing name and rabid followers 
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The playa-hatin rabid followers is understandable but: 1. New rapid followers maybe weren't computing around CRT time, so it's new to them 2. Behavior and time spent on computers (persona/professional) today vs then is wildly different
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Yes, in addition to that display quality today is good enough that you can have subtle contrast changes and light-on-dark text is not a mess of fuzzy, fringing pixels like in the 1970s.
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Some vector displays were really high res! I tried an original Asteroids arcade machine at an exhibition in Berlin and the detail was astonishing. (I know there was also a “raster” like use of vector displays which wasn't as detailed :–)https://youtu.be/w60sfReTsRA?t=22 …
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Replying to @rsms
QuadraScans! I love those. But I meant more the halo around lit vectors/pixels, which all arcade displays shared. In offices, I believe it was a human factors catch 22: Halo was bad for ergonomics. Removing it meant sacrificing contrast, which was… bad for ergonomics. :·)
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I’m not really an expert on display history, but I think throughout 1970s, dark-on-light text was rarely attempted because the halo would just bleed into text too much?
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Only later with Mac, maybe NeXT, and then Windows in the 1990s… and non-CRT displays, of course. We got so excited about the desktop metaphor that we haven’t seen light-on-dark much before iPhone brought it half-back in 2007, in a very different world.
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So I think part of the excitement is that to many people it does feel like a new thing! But if you put aside the marketing and excitement, I believe there are some genuine benefits…
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Replying to @mwichary
What would be really interesting: Customization options in mass-market software. MS Windows, Firefox and Chrome are the only examples of mass-market software I can think of that offers pretty granular UI customization.
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Replying to @rsms
I think that is a super interesting subject! I have not found a great treatment of it, but someone must have written about this, right?pic.twitter.com/MI5dYdNqiQ
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I mean just Winamp itself is such a fascinating thing.
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