These "defaults" are the 4-bit colors linearly mapped onto the RGB space. It made the color generation easier to implement in hardware.
I think the sensible use case for this color is as background color, like the Norton Commander, derivatives of it, and several other ncurses programs do.
Exactly! I just wish the article got to the real issue, which is that sRGB isn't a linear color space (roughly quadratic) and your eyes perceive blue luminosity as ~10% of the brightness of green (red is ~%50).
That means that a half blue (00 00 7F) would be 22% as bright as full blue (00 00 FF) with an apparent luminosity (Lab) of 2.2% compared to full green (FF 00 00) or 1.6% of the luminosity of full white (FF FF FF). No wonder it's hard to see!
Ummm, misperceive blue? Relative to what, green, and red?
There is a thing called white balance. Although the eye/mind will adjust to different levels of blue (absent an environmental source) the apparent 10x gain adjustment needed to do this is unlikely to be effective or comfortable to anyone using such a monitor. I suspect the violet halo of such a "white" would be searing and likely not appear balanced in any way.
Yep, the venerable 16-color palette is at least as old as CGA: [1]. And the "annoying" dark blue is not even #00F, it's approximately #00A (and similarly to the other "dark" colors; the "bright" colors are roughly #55F etc.) CGA text mode character cells comprise 16 bits, with 8 bits encoding the character, and 3+1+3+1 bits the foreground color, foreground intensity, background color, and blink state respectively.
I think the sensible use case for this color is as background color, like the Norton Commander, derivatives of it, and several other ncurses programs do.