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this also caught my attention. the author also questions why the screens are blue

I think he has just forgotten that in the late 90s, these color choices were entirely obvious and followed the Windows design precedent, which is why he probably didn't think much about it at the time

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Indeed. For example, Windows 95's My Computer icon might have had a teal background to match the default desktop background, but the screen of the peer computer in the Network Neighborhood icon was blue.

I'd accuse windows of knowingly setting expectations by choosing a blue screen as the default, but they were using it before the BSOD was even a thing

DOS-based editors used a blue background often: WordPerfect, QuickC…

Do you remember Microsoft Word’s “Jerry Pournelle mode”? He convinced them to ship a feature that forced Word to render white text on a blue background, just like his favourite word processor, so that he would switch. I think the last version with this feature was Word 2003.

I used to use that occasionally!

It was Pournelle that inspired it? Really?

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