Revisiting why hyperlinks are blue
This is a fun follow-on article building on another fun  article.  Unfortunately it seems that with a decent probability the entire premise of the first article is wrong.<p>The original article concludes that Marc Andreessen added blue hyperlinks to NCSA Mosaic in 1993, and that&#x27;s where blue came from in web browsers.  This appears to have stemmed from the mistaken notion that WWW.app (Tim Berners-Lee&#x27;s browser) was only monochrome.   And this follow-on article makes the same claim:<p>&gt; It is also interesting to note that WWW.app, the browser he was creating at the time, did not use blue hyperlinks.<p>But that&#x27;s not true.  It&#x27;s true that WWW.app as originally created didn&#x27;t have blue hyperlinks because it was written on early NeXT cubes, which were 2-bit monochrome.  But NeXTs were color as of 1990.  And it&#x27;s clear that as of 1993 WWW.app had blue links, as we had dug up in <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28318055" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=28318055</a>  In 1991 Tim Berners Lee had added comments indicating support for color hyperlinks in the immediate future.  At some point between 1991 and 1993 this feature was turned on, and links were set to blue.<p>Since they both had or added blue by 1993, it is not clear whether Marc beat Tim to it or vice versa, but it seems to me likely that Tim was first.  This is because (1) Since they both chose blue, it seems probable that one was copying the other. NCSA Mosaic was copying WWW.app wholesale in most aspects, and not the other way around AFAIK.  And (2) Tim was influenced by earlier hypertext systems which used blue, as discussed in this article.<p>Unfortunately neither of these articles actually ask Tim when he added it: they just assume WWW.app ran only on monochrome machines when, long before 1993, NeXT workstations were in color.