[HN Gopher] Iconography of the PuTTY tools
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Iconography of the PuTTY tools
Author : Tomte
Score : 113 points
Date : 2025-03-12 19:29 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.chiark.greenend.org.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.chiark.greenend.org.uk)
| acheron wrote:
| He says he doesn't remember why he picked blue for the screen,
| but that was a standard color for screens depicted in Win 3.x and
| Win95 icons, so I would assume he was just following that.
| timthorn wrote:
| And I think that B&W made sense as back then, there would have
| been a number of monochrome portable computers still in
| service.
| mhitza wrote:
| I would also guess that Windows 95/98 in high contrast mode
| had an influence.
| susam wrote:
| EDIT.COM and MS-DOS installers too had blue background. In
| fact, blue (CGA colour 1) was a very popular background colour
| for many tools. For example, white on blue was a popular colour
| theme for Turbo Pascal, Turbo C, etc. With the limited number
| of colours available back then, blue was one of the few
| background colours that was easy on the eyes.
|
| Also, you are right indeed. I remember Windows 3.1, 95, 98,
| etc. used blue as the screen colour for icons depicting
| computers. For icons that had two computers (e.g. "Network
| Neighborhood"), one computer had blue screen and the other one
| had cyan.
| bhaak wrote:
| You can see several examples on this page
| http://toastytech.com/guis/win31.html that depict an icon with
| a computer which is almost identical to the one used by putty.
|
| I had to zoom in to verify that it's not the same.
| HenryBemis wrote:
| oh man what a trip down memory lane that was!!! I haven't
| seen win3.1 for sooooooo long.. thank you for the link and
| the trip!
| smallnix wrote:
| Thanks for the blog post, I like these personal pieces of
| software history
| adt wrote:
| I remember this from the 90s.
|
| And I _love_ your use of italics, Simon!
| Lammy wrote:
| I wonder if the "Agent" hat iconography was inspired by Forte
| Agent, the most (IMHO) popular Usenet software for Windows, which
| used a very similar motif: https://archive.org/details/forte-
| agent-1.6
|
| Love reading this kind of history straight from the creator :)
| cluckindan wrote:
| It's from the "Spy vs. Spy" comic strip.
| rzzzt wrote:
| I'm seeing Carmen Sandiego in it for some reason, but the
| modern version (from 2014) has a film noir detective in the
| same spot (the application icon is still the lady in the hat):
| https://youtu.be/h-_UNm_gycU?t=94
| rzzzt wrote:
| This sentence resonates with me: "After a few failed attempts, I
| realised that Pageant would never get released at all if I waited
| until I'd drawn the icon I wanted". Many of the projects I'd like
| to tinker with stop at such self-inflicted roadblocks. My
| favorite is getting stuck at naming the repository/top-level
| folder.
| TZubiri wrote:
| Deadlines!
|
| Project Management is always disregarded as waste in hacker
| circles, but figuring out how to move projects forward is a
| worthwhile role in projects.
| metalliqaz wrote:
| AKA "bike-shedding"
| rzzzt wrote:
| I don't expect fully fledged brand names to pop out of my
| brain and don't workshop it endlessly, but I can't call all
| of them "New folder" either.
| ghxst wrote:
| One of the areas LLMs has been most helpful to me personally
| has to be getting over naming choices lol, whether it's repos,
| variables or structs for some reason I tend to have a hard time
| coming up with names :').
| Sharlin wrote:
| _> I can't remember why the lightning bolt was yellow. With
| hindsight that seems the strangest thing about it; cyan would
| have been a more obvious choice for electricity. Possibly it was
| just to contrast more with the blue screens of the computers._
|
| I had to stop and consider this, because it seemed to me that
| yellow was "obviously" the correct color. And indeed a few image
| searches confirmed this: a yellow lightning bolt is by far the
| most universal symbol for electricity, along with the standard
| black-on-yellow danger icon. I'm not sure how far back in history
| that representation goes, or what its origins are, but I think
| it's been used ubiquitously in comics and cartoons for a long
| time.
| metalliqaz wrote:
| this also caught my attention. the author also questions why
| the screens are blue
|
| I think he has just forgotten that in the late 90s, these color
| choices were entirely _obvious_ and followed the Windows design
| precedent, which is why he probably didn 't think much about it
| at the time
| gerdesj wrote:
| Simon Tathum is British and I have never knowingly seen a
| lightning bolt coloured cyan hereabouts. Our "Danger of death"
| signs are black on yellow (1)
|
| To be fair an image search for lightning does look decidedly
| cyan on royal, with purple, red and more options.
|
| (1) https://www.hse.gov.uk/electricity/nearelectric.htm#signs
| RadiozRadioz wrote:
| > I think that's probably because the 1990s styling is part of
| what makes PuTTY what it is - "reassuringly old-fashioned"
|
| This is definitely something that attracts me to PuTTY. There
| _is_ something reassuring about applications that look the way
| PuTTY does - maybe the aged look projects stability due to lack
| of change, maybe it's just the additional cohesion from using OS
| primitives, I'm not sure. What I am sure of is that I find the
| opposite to be true for apps with a "modern" aesthetic; the more
| material design, rounded corners, transitions, low contrast, high
| padding I see, the more I experience feelings of distrust and
| skepticism.
|
| I'm not qualified to psychoanalyze it, but I'd hazard that it's
| not an uncommon interpretation in some user groups, given the
| pockets of fans of PuTTY-esque design.
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