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I only now realized that the ANSI color codes for red (1), green (2), and blue (4) are arranged on powers of two and that the rest correspond to addition of the primaries: 3=yellow, 5=magenta, 6=cyan, 7=white.
@Bombe someone was paying attention to prior art in the field. ;)
@pesco It's been almost 20 years since I first typed a COLOR statement in a QuickBasic program and I have never considered this. I just had memorised what each of the numbers did. Looks like QuickBasic had different colours, but it's the same concept.
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/QBasic/Text_Output#Color_by_Number
https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/QBasic/Text_Output#Color_by_Number
@pesco this probably allowed for bit mask cleverness too, sort of like hex color codes, but for when nibbles were still a thing.
@pesco Huh. Can't recall if I've thought about this -- but yeah, it's straightforward 1bit-per-channel, 3bit color.
@pesco Wow. Wait. WOW. WOW. O_O
@pesco Holy shit! mind_blown.gif
@pesco duh. EGA and VGA colour palettes as well. :)