Windows 3.1 included a red and yellow ‘Hot Dog Stand’ color scheme so garish it was long assumed to be a joke, so I tracked down Microsoft’s original UI designer to get the true story

@[email protected]

The article doesn’t really explain why except “maybe someone would like it” but I think the real answer was CGA. CGA was a predecessor color technology to VGA with a different 8 bit color space. So if you took a color scheme for CGA and rendered it on VGA you’d end up with a really garish scene.

When I was a kid I had a DOS game that I played the hell out of. I ended up ruining the disk, and stupidly didn’t have a backup, but the box included a CGA version of the game. It played just fine on my computer except that the colors were trippy on my VGA monitor.

T3CHT

I remember, surprisingly, wondering wtf. "It was just a garish choice, in case somebody out there liked ugly bright red and yellow.

The ‘Fluorescent’ theme was also pretty ugly, but it didn’t have a catchy name, so I’ve never heard anything about it."

@[email protected]

i’m starting to think that i was the only one who liked it. lol

it was so bright that it made the office were i used it a little bit more cheerful to me.

Windows 3.1 included a red and yellow ‘Hot Dog Stand’ color scheme so garish it was long assumed to be a joke, so I tracked down Microsoft’s original UI designer to get the true storyplus-square

Windows 3.1 included a red and yellow ‘Hot Dog Stand’ color scheme so garish it was long assumed to be a joke, so I tracked down Microsoft’s original UI designer to get the true storyplus-square

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Windows 3.1 included a red and yellow ‘Hot Dog Stand’ color scheme so garish it was long assumed to be a joke, so I tracked down Microsoft’s original UI designer to get the true story

Windows 3.1 included a red and yellow ‘Hot Dog Stand’ color scheme so garish it was long assumed to be a joke, so I tracked down Microsoft’s original UI designer to get the true story