Ask HN: Why is free space pink colored?

Posted by tomw1808 on Thursday March 13, 2014 @03:58AM
from the ask-hn dept.

Something that I was wondering for a long long time, and I still have no answer to:

In the drive properties of windows, the free space is marked as pink or purple, the used space blue. Why not a shade of green and red?

Has this a design reason or historical techical reason?

( 4 comments | 5 points | on HN )

Re:Ask HN: Why is free space pink colored? by pavlov on Thursday March 13, 2014 @04:13AM (#7390580)

Probably a Microsoft programmer once wrote a line like this as a placeholder so he could get something on screen:

fillColor = (used) ? 0x0000ff : 0xff00c0;

And then he got an emergency assignment to fix an obscure SQL Server bug related to NTFS extended attributes, and "fillColor" was never touched again.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: Why is free space pink colored? by tomw1808 on Thursday March 13, 2014 @04:39AM (#7390639)

is it 0xff00c0 ?

On my windows machine here its either

0xff00ff or 0x0000ff

Eventually he was just lazy and had no color palette ready?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Ask HN: Why is free space pink colored? by LarryMade2 on Thursday March 13, 2014 @10:41AM (#7392061)

Ok, lets go back first IBM standard graphics mode ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Graphics_Adapter ) had a limited palette which was black, light cyan, light magenta and white. maybe they were being backwards compatible.

Seems as logical as any other theory

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Re:Ask HN: Why is free space pink colored? by duochrome on Thursday March 13, 2014 @04:02AM (#7390556)

I know that purple is very close to invisible lights. Maybe that's the reason. Purple, invisible, nothing.

[ Parent | on HN ]