For a brief, glorious period of the late 1990s, Crayola’s yellow crayon had an alter ego: “world wide web yellow.” Purple was “www.purple” and screamin’ green was “green.com.” The 16 crayons of the “Techno-Brite” lasted for just a couple of years. But two decades later, they’ve become a viral snapshot of what the internet was like in 1997 — and just how much it’s changed.
Erika Merklinger, a spokeswoman for Crayola, confirmed to us that these crayons — from “plug & play pink” to “megabyte blue” were all very real. There was also an eight-piece marker collection that went along with it.
The tech-themed colors weren’t actually new colors. They were just repurposed shades from some of Crayola’s existing collections (particularly neon), and were probably named by an internal team at the time, Merklinger said. There wasn’t a promotion associated with the internet crayons, and Crayola couldn’t really find us much more information than that about the collection.
Looking back on it, 1997 was kind of a weird time for the language we use for talking about the internet. It’s the same year that the amazing “Kids’ Guide to the Internet” came out, a 30-minute video that has since become a Mother Meme for a bunch of jokes about how dumb we were in the ’90s. It’s the sort of video in which, plausibly, you can have a child say, “What’s a web page, something ducks walk on?”
