What I found interesting was the rationale behind the 16 available colors. Black and white, RGB, CMY, gray, and dark versions of each outside of B&W. Makes so much sense, but I never thought of it that way.

Looks better than windows 11

Garish yes, but it was great for color-blind people.

From the article:

“I do remember some discussion about whether we should include it, and some snarky laughter. But it was not intended as a joke. It was not inspired by any hot dog stands, and it was not included as an example of a bad interface—although it was one. It was just a garish choice, in case somebody out there liked ugly bright red and yellow.”

I would use it for a few hours every now and then. It was fun.

It's something all os's lack today. Except Hanna Montana.

The article doesn't really explain why except "maybe someone would like it" but I think the real answer was CGA. CGA was a predecessor color technology to VGA with a different 8 bit color space. So if you took a color scheme for CGA and rendered it on VGA you'd end up with a really garish scene.

When I was a kid I had a DOS game that I played the hell out of. I ended up ruining the disk, and stupidly didn't have a backup, but the box included a CGA version of the game. It played just fine on my computer except that the colors were trippy on my VGA monitor.

I remember, surprisingly, wondering wtf. "It was just a garish choice, in case somebody out there liked ugly bright red and yellow.

The 'Fluorescent' theme was also pretty ugly, but it didn't have a catchy name, so I've never heard anything about it."

Even as a kid using 3.1 I always thought that Hot Dog Stand was an odd theme, but I did use it from time to time.

I loved messing with the themes and the After Dark screensavers.