This term was coined when color terminals/monitors (especially on PCs running
MS-DOS) were becoming more pervasive. Common systems allowed for a fixed palette of 16 colors with a very high saturation. When software started to use the colors (and ANSI.SYS became a thing) the common focus was to give all different elements a different color. (This notion is maintaned today by Emacs' font-lock-mode and other syntax highlighting variants.) The result was a
wild mix of red, green yellow,
white, black and
blue - almost like in a fruit salad - that might easily hurt your eyes .
While the very first versions of
Windows sufferd the same issues with the palette , GUIs in general don'
t expose the same problem and don'
t put too many high-contrast-colors all over the screen.