Crayola names in ’90s coloured by web boom

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 spokesperson for Crayola, confirmed 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 colours weren’t actually new colours. 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.

You may have seen these very 1997 crayons before, because they seem to have a way of going viral every couple of years, as “hilariously dated” reminders of how we used to really talk about the internet.

With Crayola having little to say on the birth of these perpetually viral crayons, the most information we could find online about them comes from part 27 of Crayoncollecting.com’s 43-part history of Crayola’s colours, which notes that the collection sold well enough at the time to be reprinted. The site is also the source of the original image that went viral in the first place.

In conclusion: Yes, in 1997 we were huge dorks about the internet. Look how far we’ve come since then.