Talk:Beige box

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Computing

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IBM PC

The original IBM PC had a grey case, not beige, although the bezel was a light off-white. 121a0012 01:38, 4 August 2007 (UTC)[reply]

That is true, although I think that the person that wrote it was thinking of other "older" ones, such as the ps/2 Nevermind1534 (talk) 20:42, 28 March 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Reason

I've also read the reason for beige was that it was the same colour as dust. That way the machines would still look OK even if they had some dust on them. Compare with dust on something black. // Liftarn (talk)

The YouTube video Why Are Old Computers Beige? offers the most likely explanation I've heard for the phenomenon. From page 174 of the book ThinkPad: A Different Shade of Blue, as quoted in the video:

In the late 1970s, Germany initiated workplace standards that required "light-value" colors on office computing equipment; these standards were soon picked up by other European and Scandinavian countries. Then, during the 1980s, any offerings other than gray and off-white were virtually eliminated across the computer industry because of cost and the European workplace standards.

On a perhaps related note, there was a version of the C64 popular in Germany (now known as the Aldi C64, after the German supermarket, although it was sold elsewhere too) that had a cream-coloured keyboard before the also-cream-coloured slimmer C64C was released worldwide. ZoeB (talk) 22:49, 2 January 2018 (UTC)[reply]