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I love that color too. Fun trivia that I discovered doing pixel art way back then: That color is blue.

It appears purplish, but it's actually a desaturated blue with hue right at 240°. Something about the lack of saturation and brightness gives it a purplish cast.

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It’s funny how mixing pure blue (#0000ff) with pure white (#ffffff) makes it look a little purple, and how you also have the exact same problem when you invert the colors - mixing pure yellow (#ffff00) with pure black (#000000) makes it look sort of green (the complementary color to purple). In both cases you have to adjust the green channel a little “faster” and the red a little “slower” to get something that looks more neutral, ie shift the light blue towards cyan and the dark yellow towards red.

That seems similar to the "perwinkle blue" that was used as the default background in Apple IIGS ProDOS16 / GS/OS. In that case it was done with pairing white pixels with blue pixels.

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