For a stretch of the 1990s, the whole web seemed to share a single wardrobe of colours, and there was a hard technical reason for it. The graphics cards of the day could show only 256 colours at once, and of those the system software claimed around forty for its own menus and cursors and window frames. That left a working budget of 216, and out of that limit designers built a palette every browser could be trusted to render the same.

The 216 were not chosen for beauty but for arithmetic. Take six evenly spaced values for red, six for green, six for blue, and combine them, and six times six times six comes to 216: a neat cube of colour that any machine could reproduce without inventing a shade it did not have. The steps landed on hex values that still feel oddly canonical to anyone who was there, the familiar ladder of 00, 33, 66, 99, CC and FF. Stay on those rungs and your colour survived the trip to any visitor's screen intact; stray off them and the browser would dither, scattering dots to fake a colour it could not truly show.

That constraint is why so many pages from the era share a certain look, a family resemblance born of everyone drawing from the same small box. It is worth remembering the next time you reach for any hex value you please and build a gradient of thousands of shades between two of them. That freedom is spending a colour budget these 216 never had, a richness the early web could only dither toward. The web-safe palette is a fossil of scarcity, a reminder that the screen was once a place where colours had to be counted.