Why do we have max. 256 colors in terminal emulators? [closed]
It's because that's how many colors you could encode in a single byte. Not only that, actually most terminals only had 16 colors (using only 4 of the 8 bits) the other 4 bits were flags used to indicate some thing to do with a character. Most common flags were: highlight, underline, blinking and reverse; (or some other terminal capability)