At one point, I read this great piece about monitor Gamma, and how, even back in the day, video cards on Macs and Windows boxes measured out to the exact same Gamma spec.  This lead me down a long road, ending at Bill Atkinson's studio in California...

Gamma, how 1.8 became the Mac "standard" and the History of Color Management- an Excerpt from Color Pipeline:

How do I use gamma in color management?

I set the “gamma” selection at 2.2 when I calibrate my monitors. That’s it. My video card and my monitor have a gamma of 2.2, regardless of the so-called Apple and Windows “standards.”

That brings me to a story to loop us back around to “Life After Color Management.” It’s my Bill Atkinson story.

Bill was one of the early members of the Apple team, and developed QuickDraw and MacPaint. I had a chance to meet him in his studio, listen to him talk about color management, and to ask him some very specific questions. He patiently answered them all.

We were talking about the 1.8 versus 2.2 gamma “standards,” and I asked him why Apple made that specification. He said it was “the silliest thing;” they were working on the first laser printer, the Apple Laserwriter, and could not get the print to match the values on the screen for the life of them. This is in black and white, mind you. So they adjusted the output of the video card to 1.8. He laughed.

This is exactly my point. At that point in time these guys were just trying to get this printer to work, and printing color, much less color management, was not even a thought. In spite of this arbitrary adjustment and in the face of the actual measurements of gammas around 2.0 to 2.1 on Macs or PCs, you can still hear the arguments from all corners about the Mac and PC standards—and the resulting confusion from those arguments.

There were a lot of missteps and confusion surrounding the birth of this new medium, and it’s time to pay our respects and move on.