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Thanks for sharing! I was pleased I was able to track down Virginia and she had a clear memory of how Hot Dog Stand came to be.

Back when users picked the UI colors for the apps instead of the apps picking for the users.

Unlike the Hot Dog Stand theme, the "Plasma Power Saver" theme also featured in the article actually was function over form, not just an aesthetic choice (or lack thereof). It was to reduce burn-in on the plasma displays of old portable computers, e.g. here [0].

[0] https://retro.swarm.cz/20170331/windows-31-running-on-ibm-ps...

I'm amused she said they included it "in case somebody out there liked ugly bright red and yellow" and that "the 'Fluorescent' theme was also pretty ugly, but it didn't have a catchy name, so I've never heard anything about it."

Because I loved the Fluorescent theme.

This made me search and find this, screenshots of every win 3.11 theme:

https://imgur.com/gallery/every-windows-3-1-theme-SsVYqM1

at least half were painfully ugly

I'd rather use 3.1 with the hot dog scheme vs. windows 11...

as long as it has trumpet winsock

Legend.

My sway setup is everything as all black as I can get but with any accents as small and bright - neon green and eye bleeding magenta - as possible. So Fluorescent speaks to me.

I remember as a kid using 3.11 and win 95 and cycling through the themes, trying them all out for a day or two to decide which I wanted to use. You know, important decisions. Anyway, in an eternal black mark on my character I didn't even consider Hot Dog Stand.

A non-obvious reason that I think the yellow background would've looked especially bad to people at the time, is that most people doing non-gaming on PCs at the time were using MS-DOS programs in text mode, with 4&3-bit color, where it was very unusual for the background color to be bright.

(It was technically possible to get a bright background color on PCs in text mode, but very few programs did that.)

As a kid I actually used the theme on my first hand-me-down. As the regular theme. And I remember chosing it because it was fun! It made my computer more fun.

At the end of the day, usability shouldn't trump fun. If I find it's less usable, I can switch back.

Back in my day, changing the windows color pallets was the only form of video game we had.

And we liked it!

This brings up so many memories

We've now seemed to have invented glass, but in some kind of a parodic form.

I actually used Hot Dog Stand as the inspiration for the color combination on a big internal website years ago. A "committee" was still flapping its gums about the color choice a week before a hard launch, so I simply... decided. A moderately-unpleasant but distinctive combination went into production. I figured that would finally force them to make an actual decision after nine months of meetings. I was wrong. Users seemed to like it OK, nobody complained, so it stayed.

For almost five years.

I actually finally TOLD them, "you never actually decided, so I picked the colors to be deliberately a little obnoxious so you would actually get off the pot and decide."

They were PISSED.

Not long after, I came up with a way for users (not committees of the managers of users, who usually know nothing) to choose their own preferred colors, and over 80% of them never used that feature and left the garish original I had pulled out of my butt in 1999, because now they were used to it.