Black on White

I've scored two for two so far visiting blog sites that use white letters on a black background: http://mechanicalmongeese.com/ and http://ctusoftware.blogspot.com/. Is this some sort of trend? I hope not because I find reading these 'colorful' sites more tiresome than those with more conventional black on white text or at least some sort of very dark font on lightish background. Perhaps the CS types are more prone to using some color on black because the early electronic terminals were like that. My earliest terminals were definitely black on white - and that's black ink stamped onto white paper. Later we graduated to black ink punched with little wires onto white paper with green lines in the background (the origin of the green lines like mini music staves is a mystery). Along the way these mechanical terminals got a bit faster - all the way to around 120 characters per second. Somewhere in the 70's (or perhaps a bit earlier - I'll have to find out) we got super whizbang electronic terminals which used a CRT (look it up yourself) to show green or orange text on a dark background. The background was actually a grayish color but it looked black by comparison to the brightly glowing text. We started with 24 rows of 40 characters which seemed pretty good at the time. Somewhere in the 80's there were a few attempts to make black text on white backgrounds using the electronic terminals but the focus of the CRTs wasn't that hot and the resolution and contrast tended to be a bit poor so the overall effect was like trying to read a newspaper that had a very bright light behind it. Today I have several very nice flat-panel monitors which do black on something-a-bit-like-white quite well. The whites aren't white of course and vary a great deal between manufacturers. Despite the ability to set the color temperature, color balance and so on, it's still very hard to get them all to look like the same white. Overall though it's better. The result is better than the 110 baud teletype I started with in the 70's and it's getting to be somewhere near the quality of printing that any printer could do 50 years ago.