As for the current light on dark, I wonder if this is
just a new set of engineers making their mark. I'm sure it's better. The cost is
the same, so now it's just marketing and a way to show off being different - e.g.,
new/cool.
That kinda gets at the root of what I'm puzzling on too. At times where a dark color
scheme would've had some, if even minor, technical benefit, it was stepped away from
(as you said, Xerox is a paper company, that all makes perfect sense), however, now
we're seeing the pendulum swing at a time where any amount of phosphor relief or
other potential power savings from not driving visual content are lost on modern display
technologies.
And I'll be the first to admit the difference is probably negligible, it's not
like I've done a power consumption analysis on a tube, although in this discussion it
has made me curious if a noticable difference in power consumption could be measured
between two tubes powered up to the same state but one has zero drawing going on (i.e. no
electrons beaming to the screen) whereas the other one is on full blast bright white.
I'll add it to the list of experiments for this winter...
side tidbit - he has the patent on the loadable curser
- which was initially a martini glass, not an hourglass to show time
I was waiting for a work conference to kick off as I was reading this email, shared this
tidbit. Our resident COBOL/dinosaur era guy just remarked if programming at the time
didn't drive you to drink there was something wrong with you.
- Matt G.