Oddly 2000 was the start of silly and pretty things in the home built market .
Being cheap I ignored round and colored cables but round ones were already a thing as were a few random colors.

http://www.dansdata.com/rcables.htm

Some of the gimmicky motherboards were already non-green , can’t remember when Asrock started but they were launched in Athlon red whenever that was.

dulu wrote on 2025-03-06, 19:58:

As in the topic title. I'm building a "true 2000 build" and would like to use blue fdd and hdd cables. I got it into my head that every component has to have something that confirms its existence in the year 2000. Does anyone have an idea? For example, maybe someone has a boxed motherboard for slot 1/socket 370 that has such cables? Maybe a review of a board from that period?

Have a set somewhere in the hoard 😀 ...can't remember exactly which board (think it might have been Gigabyte but certainly later than 2000). Pretty sure the cable set was one blue IDE 40/80 ribbon + one blue floppy ribbon + some SATA (not sure if blue or not)

I wanna say around 2002-2003 or so.

Most motherboards were the same color (gold with dark green between) pretty much up until the mid Pentium 3 era. Then around that time, Gigabyte started using blue boards for their late socket 370 stuff and onwards. And MSI started using red PCBs around the early socket A / Pentium 4 era. Same goes for ECS, which I think started cranking purple and brown PCBs... as did various GPU manufacturers around the same era - i.e. around 2002-2003. FWIW, I have Gigabyte IDE cables from various late era (blue) socket A boards, and still those were not blue (but they did have blue connectors for the side that goes into the motherboard.) So probably a little while later is when blue cables started coming out too. So it might be even more of a 2003-2004 thing.

Even in the 80’s boards came in copperish (pcbs ) or green (pcb) colors, the real funky ones weren’t common until 2002ish.

The first light blue cables I encountered were from the 1980’s on a proprietary SCSI based photography machine.

Albeit rare a little color, even multiple ones definitely didn’t just start in 2000, it was far earlier. Heck a few wierd striped colored ones came out the back of an Apple 2 I got in the mid 90’s. Heck Color striped cables also came out the top of my ibm 5150 6 pack to the ports in a strange edge mounted bracket on the top rear of the machine, remove the case and the bracket would fall off

The first mainstream colored cables I saw were late 1999 and 100% were round sold at a big upsell to silly people overpaying to build their own PCs.

It was very rare that i ever saw flat but colored cables in any PC era, they were always round 99+ and thousands of PCs have passed through my fingers over the years.

If I had to bet, outside those I encountered in the 80’s
colored flat cables were likely a regional or brand specific gimmick and less mainstream than the op remembers being a thing sold for decades in low volumes.

I also saw cyan ribbon cables in stuff out of the late 80s.

All other ribbons were between grey and beige, except for those funky round ones.

PC Hoarder Patrol wrote on 2025-03-06, 21:22:

dulu wrote on 2025-03-06, 19:58:

As in the topic title. I'm building a "true 2000 build" and would like to use blue fdd and hdd cables. I got it into my head that every component has to have something that confirms its existence in the year 2000. Does anyone have an idea? For example, maybe someone has a boxed motherboard for slot 1/socket 370 that has such cables? Maybe a review of a board from that period?

Have a set somewhere in the hoard 😀 ...can't remember exactly which board (think it might have been Gigabyte but certainly later than 2000). Pretty sure the cable set was one blue IDE 40/80 ribbon + one blue floppy ribbon + some SATA (not sure if blue or not)

You are right, Gigabyte motherboards certainly had these blue cables for quite some time, Asus had some darker (almost black) ones too. Random photos from the internet:

I know that Gigabyte had blue ribbons - I have them and use them with the BX2000+ board. However, it seems to me that the ones that @konc showed in the pictures are from later 462/478 boards. That's why I'm looking for pictures that show older boards in a box with accessories - such as various Gigabyte models from that period. bx2000+/slot1, 7vx/slotA, maybe J-Bond PCI500C/Socket 4 (yes, there were AT boards with blue PCB). GA-8TX/S423 is from 2001, so pictures won't solve the problem.
I'm currently looking through various old reviews of equipment from 2000 to see if I can find blue ribbons in any of the pictures, but so far without success.