[thw_9a83c]

> ...in the early '90s, Windows provided a color-scheme editor. Users could set up any color scheme they liked, and all properly-written apps would inherit it and work fine.

The color scheme editor actually worked quite nicely up until the release of Windows 2000 [0]. After that, Windows XP introduced the "Luna" visual style (Uxtheme.dll) with inflexible, hard-coded colors. Most software developers stopped caring about color palettes, and almost all applications started using hard-coded colors in their GUIs. They tested their apps with the few skins preinstalled with Windows XP: Blue, Olive Green, and Silver.

[0]: https://imgur.com/a/sXSETJC

[VerifiedReports]

The thing is, one of the most long-lived built-in schemes in Windows was "high-contrast black," which revealed most color-palette errors in applications.