Why were most PCs and electronics beige back in the day?

Question

Back in the day (especially during the 70's and 80's), it seems that most computers and electronics were colored 'beige'. It seems it would be easy to use different colors, so why didn't they?

Some theories are:

• Beige was cheaper/easier to produce and use.
• It was the style at the time. (most likely one according to my research)
• There was little or no competition, so why try using something different.
• There was some kind of law or rule against it.

Was there a technical reason that made colors other than beige impractical, or was it a matter of style and preference?

Answer 1

Same as today - beige and light gray goes with every style, no matter if a business desk or your living room. They are a simple non-statement, the least offensive colours to most people, thus not keeping anyone from buying.

There have been endless attempts to sell stylish machinery thru all times, but looking back will reveal that the most stylish are usually also the least successful. Style requires a stance on the buyers side - one that may at least as often be negative as positive, thus repelling a number of potential customers due an issue compete unrelated with the desired function.

Neither DELL nor IBM became the giants they are/were by being fancy, but delivering average devices in toned down style.

Answer 2

The choice of beige for the plastic cases used on popular 1980s retrocomputers was not arbitrary. As a color for a popular, mass-market, personal computer, it originated with the Apple ][, where it was specifically chosen by the designer, Jerry Manock.

In 1977, Steve Jobs hired Manock, a professional designer, to create the Apple II around Wozniak's electronic design. All choices, aside from the electronics, were made by Manock. This included the choice of a neutral beige color scheme - specifically Pantone #453.

The Apple ][ was the first and only personal computer of its time to be given this level of design attention by a professional designer, who would go on to design the Macintosh. It was the case then, as now, that Apple's great commercial successes became trend setters for the computer industry. The color of the original Apple II is the earliest example of this.

The major brands that followed Apple, such as Commodore and Atari, desperately needed to capture whatever "halo-effect" they could from Apple's early success. It's not any different than Samsung's following of Apple's smartphone design trend in the 2010's.

Some will imagine that this history ascribes too much credit to Apple for their contributions to personal computer design. After all, a color choice can seem pretty arbitrary, to a non-designer. To Jerry Manock, it is anything but arbitrary, and he deserves recognition for his contributions. You can read more about his contribution to early computers here.

Answer 3

According to the "Beige box" entry of Wikipedia,

many early personal computers and dedicated word processors [...] were usually beige or similar colors like off white or ecru. These colors were presumably chosen to allow the machines to blend inconspicuously into a variety of settings, especially among similarly colored cubicles and office equipment.

Answer 4

Nostalgia Nerd produced a video on this very subject very recently. Most of the reasons he cites are already answered here. But one interesting find was that Germany and some other European countries went as far as to write it into their health and safety workplace laws that 'light-value' colors must be used in office computing equipment (7:00 into the video). As to whether this is a distinct cause is difficult to determine as it was so long ago. However, he's got a picture (at 14:17) of an IBM ThinkPad manual with "This product not for office use", apparently used as a way to skirt the workplace laws.

Answer 5

There was no technical reason that early electronics had to be beige. It was purely a design decision originally.

Beige was a very common color before the 1990s and 2000s. Most walls were painted beige, for example. A lot of the time this coincided with wood furniture and the popularity of wood grain textures and veneers. Beige went well with wood. Also consider that all lightbulbs before maybe 20 years ago or so made yellow-ish warm light, which kind of made all interiors look beige-y no matter what color the walls were.

Most office equipment was also beige. I think this is really where electronics got their inspiration. Computers were originally seen as a type of office equipment. So if they wanted to blend in (and be more likely to be purchased by companies) beige was the way to go. Some companies really put a lot of thought into the exact shade of beige like Apple and Commodore. But these were outliers. “Dark gray beige” was just so common back in the day.

I think the biggest contributor though was probably on the manufacturing side. When you go to a manufacturer, they usually have a list a “default” or “standard” options that are always available because they use them frequently for other companies. You can usually get these “default” options for cheaper than going with something custom. I’m guessing the beige color was one of these “default” options because it became so commonly used and manufacturers probably ordered the materials necessary in bulk. You can see this trend today with silver and black. They are usually the cheapest color options you can go with because manufacturers always have them on hand and use them every day.

At some point though around the 1990s, painting walls beige and using wood textures on literally everything went out of style and was seen as old fashioned. White became the new beige for wall colors because it was brighter and was considered to make a room a “happier” place to be. Black equipment became a lot more common, and over the years beige computers didn’t really fit in anymore. Then Apple came along and started making everything out of aluminum and a lot of companies followed, and so black and aluminum kind of became the new standard. I don’t want to attribute design decisions made by Apple to every industry standard, but I do think they really popularized the use of aluminum over plastic.

Answer 6

The answer is the smoking rate.

Cigarette smoking stains everything, especially plastic. If you look further back to the 70s, and in appliances in general, the gradual progress from avocado/gold-yellow/brown, to tan, to off white, and finally white tracks lower levels of smoking in homes and at the workplace.