I’m a bit colourblind. It only affects certain ranges of colours. I first realised this when I got a Vic-20. No, really. The default screen colour was white, and the default border colour was cyan.
I thought cyan looked like green. People tell me it’s really a light blue, indeed I remember reading an interview with some Commodore engineers who had debated about whether to call it light blue or cyan.
There were eight colors available; white, black, red, cyan (light blue), purple, green, navy blue, and yellow.
In real life my colourblindness is so mild it only seems to affect one thing: spotting the numbers in Ishihara tests.
14 replies on “How I discovered I’m a bit colourblind”
My first PC was a TRS 80 Coco, and I clearly remember wondering what the hell “cyan” and “magenta” were. I think I had a grand total of 16 colours, but the resolution for me to play with was like 80*40 or something. Surprising what pictures you can come up with though :)
My son is colour blind in the red/green range.
So I shouldn’t freak when he pairs orange jeans with purple t-shirts…apparently. :P
I have friends who are twins and they are both really colourblind. When we were kids it was always funny – I remember once when we were about 6 or 7 they were almost at blows arguing over thier favourite socks which they were both claiming to be a different colour.
We always teased them that they were part dog which is why they couldn’t see colours properly.
I had a roomate in my university days that was colorblind. He would get upset if you asked him how he perceived a certian color but he would ask me to look at cloths sometimes to identify the color. To him a green traffic light appeared white and green stripes on his shirt appeared grey. He could not tell the difference between dark brown or navy pants and socks. I had another friend once who could not tell yellow and red apart and he would have to look at the order and not the color of traffic lights to tell a yellow from a red light. This was a problem when he came across a single flashing light and could not tell if it was yellow meaning proceed with caution or red meaning a stop sign.
I just took a different online color test (second external link on the wikipedia page) and got a perfect score. It had many boxes with a grid and a letter, number or shape behind the grid and some other colored boxes to identify. It seems to determine the type of colorblindness (Daltonism) one has. Did you try this test too?
I have the same issue – that Cyan just looks greenish to me.
These bloody Ishihara colour tests are what stopped me from joining the RAF when I was younger. I can see fine, it’s just a very mild difference in shades to me.
The alternative to Ishihara test Jed refers to describes me as being 47% likely to be a sufferer of Deuteranomaly (or red/green colourblindness), with the suffering element being green (deuteranopia).
It doesn’t affect my life one jot.
Just remembered – Oliver Sacks (who wrote the book upon which that movie Awakenings was based) also wrote about The Island of The Colorblind.
The first computer I used was a Sinclair ZX-80. I don’t recall if it had colours or not.
I really don’t get what’s wrong with purple and orange combo. It just sounds bright to me.
Goodness, you had a Vic 20 too? Obsolete within a year of coming out, as the Commodore 64 just came along!
I later had a couple of Tandy TRS80s which were actually very good machines for word processing (which was what I needed at the time). Indeed, I typed half the manuscript for a freiend’s book on one! (Can;t believe I did all that now without things like, er, a mouse!)
Back to the Vic 20, I, too, was puzzled by the word “cyan”. I knew what “magenta” was, though, as a result of growing up with Gerry Anderson’s “Captain Scarlet”!
I have only just found out it was the music that I liked from the C64 games all along.
Goto80 is cool!
Aaahh, the good ol’ days of the Commodore 64! When you could start loading up a game, go make a cup of tea, come back, and STILL wait a couple of minutes!! I still have mine, and it still works- well, the last time I connected it up was over a year ago! Was it just me, or did many of the games take longer to load than to play, because you’d wait 5 minutes to load a game, then after playing a minute of it, you’d realise it was crap, and reset it!! It was even worse with the tape deck- God, I can’t imagine I’d ever again wait half an hour to load a crap game!!!!!!
Boy, it did have a lot of crap games, but many great ones- classic ones!!
By the way, does anyone remember this ad and jingle from 20 years ago!?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_f3uIzEIxo
Apart from the music, also loved the multi-coloured loading border screens that epileptics wouldn’t be able to watch! Great times!!
Only 5 mins? When I first got a C64, before TurboTape had been devised, some games took about 15 mins to load!
That Youtube video is a bit painful on the ears due to the muffly sound. Have a look around though, there are others.
I read something just this week you may want to investigate (but probably not): they may have discovered a cure for colorblindness. I hope I’m remembering that right and not sending you on a wild goose chase…
Ah! Here we are:
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/09/colortherapy/
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,802584,00.html
I’m colour blind and 2 of my brothers are too.
One of the best sites around is http://www.vischeck.com, great for explaining to non-colourblind people what it means with examples.