Black Background

eax.qbyte

eax.qbyte

Remember those days computers were shell-only environment with commands you could run? Background was restricted to black unless you had done some config which were rarely done in PCs.
But after graphic cards came in to market OS developers started to add graphical GUI in their production letting you choose any colorful picture you like as background with nice icons.
But there were some people always missing their old blipping cursor which were helping them do every thing typing commands and didn't have to do every little thing among a lot of wizards and visual components, and they didn't know what was that wizard doing because they didn't have access to source, and a proper shell command didn't exist for them to do the equivalent job, and the saddest thing was that they had paid for that source closed stuff. That was when story of open source OSs started.
I don't know why every thing in this world works upside down: "You have to pay for cheaper things and you get more expensive things for free".
Well let's not go too much off topic from main line of our off topic discussion. Yea, We gonna talk about black backgrounds here.
So people could set a very nice scene of nature as background picture of their computing dude box. They thought "Oh Yeah, Now I'm free of that hellish black and white world, I can do every thing now, Super Mario is in level 9-1 now .. bla bla".
But here, I'm going to say:"May be that black and white world not only because of commands you could run but even for the color scheme itself was not that bad!"
I bet you don't want to know "why", You are now hardly curious to know "Why!!!???", But I'm not gonna to tell ya, ha ha.
Allright, Don't hurt yourself, I'm going to say my reasons:
Note that these are my personal opinion to be shared and I respect yours even if it is opposite.
Main reason: More light makes your eyes more tired "Cows feel that even better". As you all know LCDs or Monitors produce light in their pixels to create color. Total black is 0x000000(no light) and total white is 0xFFFFFF(full light) then it fires that little spectre againt our eyes. Then the eye guy recieves the spectre and does process on it. If the color is 0x00.. every thing is easier. That's why you use sun glasses at noon or turn off the lights at sleep. Oh, no no, don't get me wrong don't open the config file right away... No, don't tab out... ah damn.. somebody call him back please.
Alright you back now? So we can continue.
Second reason: I think producing less light will improve life time of your LCD or monitor.
Thank you all for reading. Have a good time.
 
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To me, a white (or light) background is hard to read because of the large amount of meaningless light distracting me.

I use green text on a black background and that's the clearest I've found. I did like the old IBM 5151 with the warm and slow phosphor, but nobody is using TTL these days. The nice thing about setting those colours in a GUI is that one can add a little more clarity, via coloured prompts etc. Also, green is at the centre of our light sensitivity and is generally fairly clean so that we avoid chromatic aberation and the slightly fuzzy image resulting from lack of common focus with multiple frequencies.

People report that bright text on a black background is hard to get used to. I don't doubt that, but nevertheless the physical facts of clarity and quick recognition, belie their claims. It does take a little while to adapt to any change, but the brain will usually do it after a little practice.

The whole idea of black type on a white background is interesting. Yes, it gives good contrast, but the actual choice was based on the limitations of technology at the time. It's actually quite simple. Ink and paper. Black ink of high quality (and particular high coverage) is fairly easy to make and use. White is much more difficult, doesn't easily form as good an ink, and has poor coverage.

Now for the paper. The basic product is light colored to start. To make that black requires a lot of pigment. It is an expensive process and a good quality black paper is not suitable for general use. Hence, we end up with a buff or bleached background.

This paper and ink technology ran for many generations and is still in heavy use. The reason, however, is the practicality of the basic technology, and not the ultimate clarity of the resulting text. We've lived with this for so long that it seems odd when we change it. But now that we have computers, we should. :)
 
Thank you and I remind here, there is a significant difference between Paper and digital output.
On paper full color is black. You draw multiple colors on each other you create darker color. And non colored means white.
I believe the light preasure thrown at eye from a white paper is a lot less than same from monitor. You can try reading some paper under stright sunlight can be abusing to your eye too. If we want to be natural, we must adapt with nature of our tool.
Even mother nature has created the sky in black(or dark color) with tinsy shiny lights inside. If you get a little far from earth, that will happen in day too. Means black background is most efficient for both user and producer!
 
I like a black bg because I use white text and transparency in my terminal and it makes it much easier for me to read. A white bg is too bright and a lot of bright colors distracting.

Red seems to go with that somehow so that's a theme I often go with.
 
Well, if you would like to spread your b ideas unopposed, there is always /r/freebsd. Although, you would probably get the same question even there.
 
eax.qbyte said:
Remember those days computers were shell-only environment with commands you could run? Background was restricted to black unless you had done some config which were rarely done in PCs.
Click to expand...
You mean like right now? And every day when I sit at my workstation?

I agree with shkhln. There is no point of this thread other than throwing words on the 'net like most posts on reddit.
 
I read that Green text on a black background is the best for the eyes. This is what old consoles had. Gray text on a black background is good too. White text is too bright, even on a black background. The one we often use is gray text, that we call white. There is variance in eye strain by different background monitor colors, but unless it's bright text, I don't really experience problems.
eax.qbyte said:
I think producing less light will improve life time of your LCS or monitor.
Click to expand...
If it's off or in standby mode, doesn't go through bad enough power spikes, and doesn't accumulate too much dust, they all last longer, provided they aren't powered on and off often.

With OLED, blue LEDs deteriorate faster, so they compensate by manufacturing them with larger blue LED lights. LEDs last longer than flourescent, but older LEDs, can't turn off black light either. Flourescent LCD's, even with backlighting, lower black light levels better than older LED's. OLED's have true off for black.
 
eax.qbyte said:
Remember those days computers were shell-only environment with commands you could run? Background was restricted to black unless you had done some config which were rarely done in PCs.
But after graphic cards came in to market OS developers started to add graphical GUI in their production letting you choose any colorful picture you like as background with nice icons.
But there were some people always missing their old blipping cursor which were helping them do every thing typing commands and didn't have to do every little thing among a lot of wizards and visual components, and they didn't know what was that wizard doing because they didn't have access to source, and a proper shell command didn't exist for them to do the equivalent job, and the saddest thing was that they had paid for that source closed stuff. That was when story of open source OSs started.
I don't know why every thing in this world works upside down: "You have to pay for cheaper things and you get more expensive things for free".
Well let's not go too much off topic from main line of our off topic discussion. Yea, We gonna talk about black backgrounds here.
So people could set a very nice scene of nature as background picture of their computing dude box. They thought "Oh yes, now I'm free of that hellish black and white world, I can do every thing now .. bla bla".
But here, I'm going to say:"May be that black and white world not only because of commands you could run but even for the color scheme itself was not that bad!"
I bet you don't want to know "why", you are hardly curius now to know "Why!!!???", But I'm not going to tell you, haha.
OK OK don't hurt yourself, I'm going to tell my reasons:
Note that these are my personal opinion to be shared and I respect yours even if it is opposite.
Main reason: More light makes your eyes more tired "Cows feel that even better". As you all know LCDs or Monitors produce light in their pixels to create color. Total black is 0x000000(no light) and total white is 0xFFFFFF(full light) then it fires that little spectre againt our eyes. Then the eye guy recieves the spectre and does process on it. If the color is 0x00.. every thing is easier. That's why you use sun glasses at noon or turn off the lights at sleep. Oh, no no, don't get me wrong don't open the config file right away... No, don't tab out... ah damn.. somebody tell him to come back.
Alright you back now? So we can continue.
Second reason: I think producing less light will improve life time of your LCS or monitor.
Thank you all for reading. Have a good time.
Click to expand...
You COULD have black background, it's no problem with any desktop environment. Fact is, people don't use it because it's boring. And your monitor will not die due to the colors you are displaying on it. You're probably spill coffee on it, or your kid will hit it with a ball when playing, or a friend will drop it when moving your furniture. For real, I have an LCD monitor from 2003 that is still working, mightily obsolete. Colors or no colors - believe me, it's not going to matter anyway.
One more thing, the original working background was indeed a picture of nature. When stoneage people went working, this was the only background in stock, ha ha ha LOL.

Cheers
 
For both normal paper and screens, black letters on white background are best for human eyes, in general (there are always exceptions, of course). This has been the result of several scientific studies.
However, there are two important points to keep in mind:

First, that only holds true if you use a flicker-free display. What is considered flicker-free is very subjective. Some people are ok with 75 Hz, some are not. This also depends on the type of display, i.e. for quick displays (gaming monitors) you need a much higher refresh rate than for slow monitors that have a certain “afterglow effect”. In the 90ies of the last century, you commonly had CRT screens that were not flicker-free, that's why many people preferred a black background. But the situation has changed.

Second, many people tend to turn brightness and contrast of their screen way too high. If you do that, it will indeed be uncomfortable to use a bright background. It's best to set the brightness so that it is not much higher than the brightness of a (white) wall in a normally lit room. And of course, the lighting should be so that you have the light source neither behind you nor right in front of you. The screen surface should be perpendicular to the windows of the room.
 
olli@ said:
First, that only holds true if you use a flicker-free display. What is considered flicker-free is very subjective. Some people are ok with 75 Hz, some are not. This also depends on the type of display, i.e. for quick displays (gaming monitors) you need a much higher refresh rate than for slow monitors that have a certain “afterglow effect”. In the 90ies of the last century, you commonly had CRT screens that were not flicker-free, that's why many people preferred a black background. But the situation has changed.
Click to expand...

One note, though. Usually the term "flicker-free" is reserved for LCD backlight, this is a wholly separate thing from the picture refresh rate.

olli@ said:
Second, many people tend to turn brightness and contrast of their screen way too high.
Click to expand...

Yep. My current display brightness setting is 30 (out of 100) and then I have 50 / 22 / 0 for the red / green / blue tone settings, color accuracy be damned. Defaults on U24E850R are just painful to look at.
 
eax.qbyte said:
Remember those days computers were shell-only environment with commands you could run? Background was restricted to black unless you had done some config which were rarely done in PCs.
Click to expand...

Yes, I remember those days. I also remember the days when computers were programmed by walking up to a card punch (IBM 029 or the Univac one with memory). You could use cards of any color, but in practice, nearly all were beige. In practice, programming was actually done before you even walked to the card punch, using paper and pencil (or pen). So the original interface for a computer was black on a white background, and corrections required an eraser.

After using a variety of computers (IBM 3277, Univac Uniscope, Digital VT52 and VT100, IBM 3151, and various microcomputers like Commodore PET and Apple II), one revolutionary change in the user interface of computers that actually reached the real world was the Digital VT2xx series of terminals. For the first time you could set the text to be black on a light background (the standard model came in white, but you could order green or orange, they were monochromatic for the first few years). And even more radically, this was the first time in mass production you could get soft scroll: instead of the text jumping by one whole text line at a time, it moved by one scroll line (probably 1/512th of the screen), which made reading along as it moved by much more ergonomic. The technology for bright backgrounds and soft scroll moved to most other vendors (including clone vendors) relatively quickly, within a few years. And this all happened before PCs became universally available; in 1986, few people had a PC, but nearly all minicomputer users were switching to VT2xx style terminals.

(Yes, I know in theory things like the Xerox Alto already existed, but they were Silicon Valley toys, and didn't actually go into real production. Windowed user interfaces were years away. And IBM mainframes were way behind on this ergonomics thing, I think the successor to the 327x series, the 3180 and 3190, showed up in mass production only years later.)

Here is the interesting thing. While soft scroll was pretty universally accepted, by most users of VT2xx class terminals, the background color (black on bright versus bright on black) was hotly debated. I intentionally bought a VT2xx clone, a Falco 5000, for myself, so I could have my own terminal, and I ended up switching back and forth occasionally. It really does depend on lighting, mood, personal preference, and probably even on what one is doing (graphics versus text, coding versus watching batch processes roll along, and so on).

So the answer is: there is no single answer. Your preferences and my preferences can be differences. The arguments about display lifetimes were already debunked above.
 
roccobaroccoSC said:
For real, I have an LCD monitor from 2003 that is still working, mightily obsolete.
Click to expand...
Ha, you got me beat. I have one from 2006 that works just fine, was on all the time for about ten years. Now it sits in a box unused somewhere.
olli@ said:
Second, many people tend to turn brightness and contrast of their screen way too high
Click to expand...
I had run up the brightness on my monitor the other day. I think it's been hurting my eyes, just turned it down. But yeah the old black background with green font was comforting. On my terminal windows I use black background with white font, could easily go green if I go to the trouble of changing it.
ralphbsz said:
I also remember the days when computers were programmed by walking up to a card punch
Click to expand...
Me too. My first programming class in college (Fortran) was on punch cards. They did have some terminals, but us lowly intro students had to use the card readers.
 

FreshPorts -- x11/cool-retro-term: Terminal emulator which mimics old cathode displays

cool-retro-term is a terminal emulator which mimics the look and feel of the old cathode ray tube (CRT) screens. It has been designed to be eye-candy, customizable, and reasonably lightweight. It is based on QML port of QTermWidget (Konsole) and requires Qt 5.2+.
www.freshports.org www.freshports.org
github.com

GitHub - Swordfish90/cool-retro-term: A good looking terminal emulator which mimics the old cathode display...

A good looking terminal emulator which mimics the old cathode display... - Swordfish90/cool-retro-term
github.com github.com
 
ralphbsz said:
In practice, programming was actually done before you even walked to the card punch, using paper and pencil (or pen).
Click to expand...

Using vi must have sucked back then ;)

I can barely write 2 lines of code without getting twitchy and running a build to check for compile errors. Are you telling me that people back then used to attempt to write correct programs first time? :O
 
On microprocessors (which sometimes had really bad editors, for example if the machine has neither floppy nor disk, but uses cassettes for storage), I used to write longish programs first in pseudo-code, then write assembly code with pencil and paper, sometimes 20-30 pages long. It is a really good way to review the code and think it through. It only gets typed in once you are pretty sure it will mostly work.
 
The main reason behind this was that in those days, computer time was very expensive, in particular compared to the time of low-paid programmers (like students). Wasting the CPU on compiling and running a program that was less than 90% likely to actually function was correctly considered inefficient. This is particularly true in a big computer center, where the cycle is: write the program (on paper), type it into punched cards (at real companies, they had data entry clerks for that, for low-paid people you had to do it yourself). Then submit the program (by putting a rubber band around it and putting it into an box at the computer center), wait until the operators get around to running it, and then wait for the printed output to come out in your mailbox.

So the programming discipline was to read and review code before running it. The act of programming was much slower and deliberate. Code review and group programming was a much more natural thing, since you had time for it: you would hand the card deck to your colleague, and ask them to proof-read it first. To some extent 40 years of being able to do development online has really turned programming into a trial-and-error discipline.
 
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