angry fruit salad

In the limited palette available to stock ANSI, there were colour combinations that worked very well together -- eg. many options for [greyscale] artists, and a wide range of hues of blues from turquoise to purple. But there were also garish combinations that could be almost painful to see next to each other. Twisting the knife, some of them were also available in [blinking] combinations, upping the visual irritation ante. This term was coined to describe user interfaces enthusiasically making great use of excessive quantities of these neon, day-glo colours, to their detriment, using the heavily processed and dyed fruit (eg. Masachino cherries) in fruit cocktail salad as a metaphor.

For different reasons, both djjj's Al's House of Meats BBS and Happyfish's The Aquarium (precursor to the Jade Monkey) both featured fauvist, eye-bleeding user-hostile angry fruit salad colour schemes. (At AHOM it constituted a challenge for the user to customise their display. At the Aquarium... Happyfish just liked things bold and brassy!)

A classic definition of the term can be found as part of ESR's [Jargon File] at http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/A/angry-fruit-salad.html