Fast forward to today, and it seems that dark themes are all the rage, light characters on an otherwise dark background. This would've made so much sense during the CRT era as every part of the screen representing a black pixel is getting no drawing, but when CRTs were king, the predominant visual style was dark on light, like a piece of paper, rather than light on dark, like a video terminal. Now in the day and age of LCDs, where every pixel is on regardless, now we're finally flipping the script and putting light characters on dark backgrounds, long after any hardware benefit (that I'm aware of) would be attained by minimizing the amount of "lit surface" on the screen.
Anyone know if this has all been coincidental or if the decision for graphical user interfaces and such to predominantly use white/light colors for backgrounds was a relatively intentional measure around the industry? Or is it really just that that's how Xerox's system looked and it was all domino effect after that? At the end of the day I'm really just finding myself puzzling why computing jumped into the minimalism seen on terminal screens, keeping from driving CRTs super hard but then when GUIs first started appearing, they didn't just organically align with what was the most efficient for a CRT. I recognize this is based largely in subjective views of how something should look too, so not really expecting a "Person XYZ authoritatively decided on <date> that GUI elements shall overwhelmingly only be dark on light", just some thoughts on how we got going down this path with color schemes in computing. Thanks all!