[seltzered_]

The Mozilla article does reference the Hyperties system Ben Schneiderman worked on, linking to https://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/hyperties/ with the following comment:

" This may be an ancestor of our blue hyperlink we know and love today, but I do not believe that this is the first instance of the blue hyperlink since this color is cyan, and not dark blue."

[DonHopkins]

She clarified that in her subsequent article. It was the result of Ben Shneiderman's and his students' controlled empirical studies, not whimsy or arbitrary "creative" design (which we suffer from so much these days).

Revisiting why hyperlinks are blue:

https://blog.mozilla.org/en/internet-culture/why-are-hyperli...