Marc Andreessen Explains Blue Hyperlinks

Marc Andreessen explaining why hyperlinks are blue I think you're the guy It's easy to see. graphics computers at that And so, it could are a little sensitive to light. there at that point because that be an appealing thing.

A sit-down interview shows Marc Andreessen explaining why early web hyperlinks became blue and why early websites used gray backgrounds instead of white. The clip humorously treats a seemingly obvious internet convention as the result of limited color palettes, readability concerns, and personal preference.

I think you're the guy to ask about this. Why are hyperlinks blue? Because I like blue. Is that why? Yes. Nice, firm color. It's easy to see. So what's the story here? You're sending them off. It had to be some color. What did you do? You just had to go into the HEX code and you wrote six numbers. So at the time we were doing this, you know, I was trying to forget it's like, a lot of graphics computers at that time only had 256-dollars. They had some 8-bit color palette. And so you can kind of see all 250 colors and it's kind of like take your take your pick. And so They could have been salmon. Yeah Right yellow. I mean they had to be something that like I just stood out on the page. Yeah And so it was basically gonna be blue red purple green. I Don't like those other colors That's crazy But by the way, I also I didn't quite get this across the other thing I did was I don't like reading text on white backgrounds Because my eyes are a little sensitive to light And so if you look at early Mosaic and Eskip, the backgrounds are always gray. And so it was black text on gray background. So I used to get a lot of black for that. But I really wanted it was dark mode. But I couldn't get there at that point because the displays weren't good enough to do black. White text on black backgrounds back then was hard to read because you didn't have enough shades of gray and you couldn't quite get the, you didn't have screen resolution. You'd have that be a appealing thing.

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