[amelius]

Wasn't it the original Mac that changed it?

[pdw]

And Mac copied it from Xerox. But it was indeed the introduction of GUIs and WYSIWYG "what you see is what you get": the screen had to mimic paper.

[tempest_]

It didn't have to though.

Lotus 1-2-3 mimicked a spreadsheet and it is not searing white.

[seanhunter]

...and Lotus 1-2-3 mimiced visicalc and when I used visicalc (on an HP85a) it had a dark background with a greyish white foreground colour. ie dark mode by default.

[petepete]

Xerox had applications with white backgrounds from the start.

https://crm.org/articles/xerox-parc-and-the-origins-of-gui

[1000100_1000101]

Mac likely did use this scheme, and yes, copied it from Xerox. However neither Macs nor Xerox had mainstream use. I'd only actually seen 3 Macs in the wild before their switch to Intel, over 20 years later.

Windows adopting the "paper"-white background and whole world drooling over the arrival of Windows 3.1 and 95 is when it became the standard, I think.

[jameshart]

There's no 'likely' about it - the Mac absolutely used white as its background color for document windows and finder folders. It was striking and different when you first encountered one of the early compact Macs to see how white the screen was when you opened MacWrite.

As for the claim that Macs had no 'mainstream use' for 20 years until the Intel switch... your personal Mac-free life is a sad story, but not remotely universal, and while it's certainly true that Macs always had minority market share, it's insane to suggest they weren't influential.

[tom_]

Windows 2 was predominantly dark text on white background. Same with GEM on the Atari ST. Both current in the late 1980s.

Sinclair's ZX Spectrum was black text on white background in 1982.

[jameshart]

The ZX Spectrum was black text on a light grey background.

[int_19h]

My favorites were actually DOS TUIs, where for some reason blue became a commonly used background color for a lot of things (e.g. Norton Commander, many Borland products, FoxPro...).

[pjmlp]

Amigas used blue and Atari GEM, alongside DR-DOS and MS-DOS Doshell used white.

[morning-coffee]

Yeah, it wasn't Windows that changed it, they just hopped on the bandwagon. I remember (SunOS)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SunOS] on a SPARC in 1987 that was black in white text, and Macintosh before that.