

Ask HN: Why is free space pink colored? - tomw1808

Something that I was wondering for a long long time, and I still have no answer to:<p>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?<p>Has this a design reason or historical techical reason?
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pavlov
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.

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tomw1808
is it 0xff00c0 ?

On my windows machine here its either

0xff00ff or 0x0000ff

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

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LarryMade2
Ok, lets go back first IBM standard graphics mode (
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_Graphics_Adapter](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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duochrome
I know that purple is very close to invisible lights. Maybe that's the reason.
Purple, invisible, nothing.

