Have you ever wondered why stop signs are octagonal, or why high heels are considered fancy footwear? What about hyperlinks? Have you ever wondered why hyperlinks are blue? Well it turns out there is a reason, and the creator of hyperlinks, Marc Andreessen, knows what that reason is, and he revealed the answer this week.
Andreessen, who runs the VC firm Andreessen Horowitz, and has been called the Godfather of Silicon Valley, is also the co-creator of Mosaic, one of the earliest web browsers. As the first browser to feature text and graphics on the same page, Mosaic became the most popular method for exploring the World Wide Web after its launch in 1993. While it’s since been discontinued, some features, like the color of hyperlinks, have stood the test of time. And now we know why Andreessen picked the color blue for hyperlinks.
