[richardcrossley]

I love the Bloomberg Terminal style. I watched one of my users retrieve some product information yesterday, a few key presses and it was there. Much faster than a web application.

The colour scheme also looks good. A black background gives you many more high contrast choices. Try using yellow or cyan on a light background. It seems most of the colours are based on the old 8-bit selection; red, green, blue, cyan, yellow, white and black. Orange seems to have been added as well.

[quietbritishjim]

Actually orange is the oldest. The story goes that when the Bloomberg terminal was created in the early 80s all the consoles where monochrome, and the only choices were green or orange (on black in both cases, of course). Everyone else used green so they went with orange to be distinctive.

[masklinn]

> The story goes that when the Bloomberg terminal was created in the early 80s all the consoles where monochrome, and the only choices were green or orange (on black in both cases, of course).

It's probably not entirely true given there were dozens of known phosphors, and there were monochrome displays in other colors (e.g. the 1980 Apple Monitor III was available in green and white).

However assuming they went with pretty standard equipments green was by far the most common followed by amber. Amber is also somewhat softer on the eyes, which might have been an argument in favour given they'd have folks looking at these displays all day long, especially for charts which would fill the terminal with <color>: green monitors were OK when you had mostly black (text, curses interfaces) but it was way too harsh otherwise.

Our first computer actually had both green and amber displays, the amber display was dedicated for games and the like, anything which would light up a significant fraction of the display at once would go to the smaller amber monitor instead of the larger green one.

[hnick]

Green and orange? You just gave me a flashback to my 1980s school experience in Australia with MicroBee computers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MicroBee