Grass is green and hyperlinks are blue

April 12, 1993 – Mosaic Version 0.13

In the changelog for Mosaic for version 0.13, there is one bullet that is of great importance to us:

Changed default anchor representations: blue and single solid underline for unvisited, dark purple and single dashed underline for visited.

--Release Notes In the immortal words of Jeff Goldblum’s Ian Malcom character in Jurassic Park, “Well, there it is.”

June 8, 1993 – Cello Beta

Cello was created at Cornell Law School so that lawyers could access their legal website from Windows computers. My team mate, Molly, was able to download the 0.1 beta for me, and we were shocked by what we found:

There it was! Our hyperlink style, except it wasn’t a hyperlink, it was the heading. Our “link blue” had never shown up in user interfaces before 1993, and suddenly it appears in two instances within two short months of each other in two separate browsers at two different universities being built at the same time.

September, 1993 – Mosaic Ports

By September, a port of Mosaic was released to the Macintosh 7.1 operating system. I was able to locate a screenshot of this version which included a blue hyperlink which is the first visual evidence of the color blue being used to denote a hyperlink.