Late night screen mode6/6/2023 ![]() ![]() The graphical user interface (GUI) developed by Alan Kay at Xerox PARC and perfected by Apple in the early 1980s changed the dynamic of computer displays, orienting them around the tactile world. They went from their own aesthetic to mimicking that of another: the desktop. “Once people at home were using color,” says design historian Paul Atkinson, “it was fairly obvious that businesses needed to follow suit.” As a result, almost as soon as backlit CRT displays made it possible to make a background white instead of black, computer screens started to shift. The first home computers, like the Apple II (1977), actually sidestepped the issue of monochrome CRT displays - they were designed to be plugged into televisions. But before we get into that, let’s take a look back at early computing history and how screens changed from black to white. And yet dark mode today, although similar aesthetically to screens of the past, is actually more of an indication of where display technology will go in the future. And yet, decades later, there’s a stark, if superficial, similarity between the old and the new.įor decades, dark backgrounds have been associated with boxy, buzzy computers that ran on CRTs and had limited mobility. Modern digital screens, most of which are light emitting diode (LED) or organic light emitting diode (OLED) are far advanced from CRT ones. It’s hard to pinpoint when exactly dark mode was introduced, but in the past year or so, it’s become an increasingly popular feature in mainstream products like Facebook and Google’s mobile apps. Sometimes also referred to as “night mode,” the phrase describes an interface option available on operating systems, browsers, websites, and apps that allows a user to switch a background from light to dark. Of course, “dark mode” wasn’t a term that early computer designers would have recognized. For the very first computer screens, dark mode was default. Nascent CRT technology wasn’t efficient enough to illuminate an entire surface without burning out, which is why computers in the ’70s and ’80s had those Matrix-style black backgrounds with green text (or white, or amber). The display for the first programmable computer, the Manchester Baby (first run in 1948), was powered by cathode ray tubes (CRT), a technology perfected in WWII for use in radars, in which electron guns target and illuminate phosphors behind a glass screen. Instead, machines like IBM’s ENIAC proclaimed their functionality through punch-card printouts and flashing lights. Now that “screen” is a metonym for all digital technology-“screen time” a shorthand for staring at anything that glows-it’s easy to forget that the earliest computers didn’t have screens at all.
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