[HN Gopher] Iconography of the PuTTY tools
___________________________________________________________________
Iconography of the PuTTY tools
Author : Tomte
Score : 378 points
Date : 2025-03-12 19:29 UTC (1 days 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. Borland dBase had a
| mixture of blue and cyan background colours on various screens.
| 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.
| hinkley wrote:
| I used to stare at terminals for hours and hours with light
| grey on the blue background. White on blue is a little too
| saturated
| susam wrote:
| I believe, you and I are talking about the same colour when
| I say "white" and you say "light grey". Specifically, I
| mean colour 7, and I believe you do as well. In the CGA and
| EGA palettes, colour 7 is commonly called both "white" and
| "light grey."
|
| Colour 15, on the other hand, is typically called "bright
| white" or "high-intensity white", which is indeed too
| saturated. When I said "white," I was referring to colour
| 7, not colour 15.
|
| For reference, here's the palette I'm referring to:
| https://moddingwiki.shikadi.net/wiki/EGA_Palette
|
| Additionally, here are examples from printed materials of
| that era confirming these colour names:
|
| 1) https://archive.org/download/logo-programming-with-
| turtle-gr... - Page 6-3 refers to colour 7 as white and
| colour 15 as high-intensity white.
|
| 2) https://bitsavers.computerhistory.org/pdf/microsoft/gw-
| basic... - Page 289 refers to colour 7 as white and colour
| 15 as high-intensity white.
| hinkley wrote:
| I think you're right. NSCA Telnet was by far my most used
| floppy disk until I got a network connection in my dorm
| room.
|
| My roommate sweet talked the housing people into letting
| us have a second land line (ethernet was still being
| piloted in a different dorm) so we could log in from our
| room. It's a wonder that I was surprised when he ended up
| in management.
| 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
| paradox460 wrote:
| For me it's the spy from the wep chips challenge game
| 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.
| nickpeterson wrote:
| You should work on a new and improved filesystem
| implementation and name the project 'New Folder'.
| somat wrote:
| Isn't bike-shedding when other people block you with low-
| effort critisism.
|
| """ Parkinson shows how you can go in to the board of
| directors and get approval for building a multi-million or
| even billion dollar atomic power plant, but if you want to
| build a bike shed you will be tangled up in endless
| discussions.
|
| Parkinson explains that this is because an atomic plant is so
| vast, so expensive and so complicated that people cannot
| grasp it, and rather than try, they fall back on the
| assumption that somebody else checked all the details before
| it got this far. Richard P. Feynmann gives a couple of
| interesting, and very much to the point, examples relating to
| Los Alamos in his books.
|
| A bike shed on the other hand. Anyone can build one of those
| over a weekend, and still have time to watch the game on TV.
| So no matter how well prepared, no matter how reasonable you
| are with your proposal, somebody will seize the chance to
| show that he is doing his job, that he is paying attention,
| that he is _here_. """
|
| https://bikeshed.com/
|
| Yak-shaving comes to mind, but that is more when you have a
| large boring project you have to get through first in order
| to get to the interesting parts.
| hinkley wrote:
| Analysis paralysis.
|
| It's not usually icons for me. It's some really repetitive
| part of the project that puts me off, and I figure out some
| way to code around it, but doing so is not rewarding
| enough, or I hit some dopamine threshold where I've
| 'solved' the problem enough that I'm satisfied with the
| mental exercise alone.
| 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 :').
| hinkley wrote:
| I started trying to draw an icon for an app I'm working on.
| Curves in SVG are hard, yo. I ended up with a much simpler logo
| that makes more sense than the one I meant to make.
| 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
| camtarn wrote:
| Indeed. For example, Windows 95's My Computer icon might have
| had a teal background to match the default desktop
| background, but the screen of the peer computer in the
| Network Neighborhood icon was blue.
| autoexec wrote:
| I'd accuse windows of knowingly setting expectations by
| choosing a blue screen as the default, but they were using it
| before the BSOD was even a thing
| jagged-chisel wrote:
| DOS-based editors used a blue background often:
| WordPerfect, QuickC...
| sfllaw wrote:
| Do you remember Microsoft Word's "Jerry Pournelle mode"?
| He convinced them to ship a feature that forced Word to
| render white text on a blue background, just like his
| favourite word processor, so that he would switch. I
| think the last version with this feature was Word 2003.
| lproven wrote:
| I used to use that occasionally!
|
| It was Pournelle that inspired it? Really?
| 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
| msla wrote:
| It's like the symbol for rain being a "raindrop" that's
| shaped like a teardrop: Bulbous bottom, with a top that
| tapers to a point, which is manifestly not the shape rain
| takes in the air.
|
| https://gpm.nasa.gov/education/articles/shape-of-a-raindrop
|
| Iconography is a language, and terms in a language aren't
| usually exact representations of what they stand for.
| btilly wrote:
| No, but it is the shape of a drop that is about to drip.
| Which is a lot easier for people to see in detail than a
| falling raindrop.
| t0mas88 wrote:
| Perfectly documented warning stickers for everything is such
| a British thing. Together with fused plugs and on/off
| switches for every socket. As a foreigner who lived in London
| for a few years I believe the UK leads the world in self-
| deprecation. No country complains about itself more while
| being so absurdly well-organized.
| Twirrim wrote:
| I think, in part, because we don't have the same level of
| experience with how things are elsewhere.
| arp242 wrote:
| The "Elderly People" road signs win for me:
| https://c8.alamy.com/comp/2GYPJR6/an-elderly-people-
| roadside...
|
| The first time I saw one of these I stopped to take a
| picture. It just seems the most ridiculous thing to warn
| people about, as if somehow "elderly people" can't cross
| the road.
| devmor wrote:
| I'd saw we need them in the US, but no one walks here -
| and by the way people ignore the warning signs for
| children, I assume it'd have no effect anyways.
| usrusr wrote:
| They can and they will and when you run them over because
| you where going at the speed limit minding your own
| WhatsApp nobody will come to your rescue blaming the
| victim for jaywalking.
|
| You might consider them redundant because elderly people
| can also cross the road where there aren't any signs, but
| then few warning signs aren't.
| delta_p_delta_x wrote:
| > It just seems the most ridiculous thing to warn people
| about, as if somehow "elderly people" can't cross the
| road
|
| I don't understand this mindset. Do people not walk where
| you live, or do you not have elderly care homes? I've
| been to _multiple_ countries and nearly all of them with
| some uniform signage standard warn motorists about
| elderly and children crossing.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| I think the point is that elderly people are fairly
| sentient so you don't have to worry about them doing dumb
| things like darting out in front of a semi truck like you
| do with kids so there's no reason to warn drivers about a
| high density of them since they behave like normal
| pedestrians if perhaps a bit slower.
| gtr wrote:
| I think it's more to warn a motorist to be mindful of
| slow moving people. And older people do occasionally fall
| over too.
| chasd00 wrote:
| Naples FL needs signs like these. Only it's to warn
| motorists of elderly people attempting to pilot
| Lamborghinis and other ridiculously powerful sports cars.
| It's surreal to see valet have to help an 80 year old out
| of a aventador and the step up the curb to the door of a
| restaurant.
| gerdesj wrote:
| "while being so absurdly well-organized."
|
| I note a z in organized ...
|
| I do get where you are coming from: My mum used to joke
| about a fictional sign that said "Please do not throw
| stones at this sign". Some of our signage is absolutely
| laughable.
|
| We do have road signs that proclaim: "New signage" or "New
| road system" etc. The locals know what has changed already
| and non locals are encountering it for the first time
| anyway, so why bother.
|
| Across the entirety of the UK, our road signage is pretty
| rock solid. There may be a few degenerate cases but all
| sharp corners have chevron warning signs and they do save
| lives.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > We do have road signs that proclaim: "New signage" or
| "New road system" etc. The locals know what has changed
| already and non locals are encountering it for the first
| time anyway, so why bother.
|
| I'm not sure it's as absurd as it sounds. Do you look at
| the signage you pass every day? I suspect I don't.
|
| When they put in a new stop sign near where I live (in
| the US), things were less safe for a long time because
| people consistently drove through it without slowing.
| Since this was not a consistent problem with any other
| stop sign nearby, I believe it was not willful
| disobedience but people so used to there being no stop
| sign there that they literally didn't see it.
|
| (Even with literal neon pennants on it, people kept
| driving through it anyway, but you'd at least sometimes
| see people skid to a stop partway through the
| intersection, presumably as their brains caught up. And
| eventually it penetrated locals' consciousnesses, and now
| they stop.)
| gerdesj wrote:
| Fair point.
|
| "Do you look at the signage you pass every day?" - I do
| and so does my sodding car and it still annoys me when it
| gets the speed limits wrong!
|
| I accept I'm not everyone and noting and warning about
| change is a good idea. We do have a lot of signs and I'm
| pretty sure I've seen signs warning about upcoming
| signage (not really 8)
|
| I'm happy to report that I've driven in several US states
| (mostly FL, including around and in Miami and Orlando)
| and found it pretty straight forward. "Right on red" is
| pure genius and "four way pass in turn" is not,
| especially when multiple lanes are involved!
| genewitch wrote:
| I'm fairly certain I can find a sign that says, not
| verbatim, "no shooting at signs" riddled with bullet
| holes. There was one near the experimental USDA forest,
| but I bet I could crowd source another one.
|
| Most signs do not have bullet holes in them. Like, 98/100
| signs are holes-frei
| rconti wrote:
| Well it's certainly true that "no shooting" signs
| typically have bullet holes in them.
| zimpenfish wrote:
| > non locals are encountering it for the first time
| anyway
|
| Not entirely accurate? Non-locals may visit the area
| often enough that they're familiar with the area but will
| not necessarily be familiar with local changes.
|
| (eg parents visiting from another part of the country
| every few months)
| MisterTea wrote:
| > We do have road signs that proclaim: "New signage" or
| "New road system" etc. The locals know what has changed
| already ...
|
| Not really. New changes like adding stop signs or
| converting a one way stop to all way must be conveyed to
| locals who's muscle memory will send them sailing
| through.
|
| Happened to me recently, city added an all way stop to a
| 4-way free for all intersection and converted two
| intersections from one way to all way stop. I sailed
| right through the new all way stop the first day - no cop
| but I caught it as I went through. Missed the big yellow
| NEW STOP AHEAD too. Almost ran it again the next few
| times. Now at least 6 moths later I still see that sign
| and have to think "oh yeah, thats there."
| t0mas88 wrote:
| > I note a z in organized ...
|
| I think high school English in my country is officially
| British English, but practically we all learn from
| reading American media.
| cjbgkagh wrote:
| Organization and complaining about disorganization stem
| from the same source, an intolerance to disorder.
| petesergeant wrote:
| > No country complains about itself more while being so
| absurdly well-organized.
|
| I've noticed Australians seem to have a similar issue: they
| decry the Nanny State at home, but all the ones I've met
| abroad complain about the current location being
| insufficiently nannified. Often both complaints in the same
| conversation.
|
| Finally: Italians. I thought a trip from Milan to Rome was
| going to be like a trip through Somalia the way the
| Italians I know describe their country. In fact, everything
| seemed to work exceptionally smoothly, although whenever I
| bring this up I'm told that I simply didn't venture south
| enough.
| robinhouston wrote:
| That's not my experience of Australians at all! The
| Australians I've met (through working for an Australian
| company) all seem to love their nanny state, and
| genuinely don't understand how anyone could see anything
| undesirable in it.
| petesergeant wrote:
| Somehow the same country that venerates Ned Kelly
| smackeyacky wrote:
| You only have to watch one episode of Aussie Dash Cams to
| see how we Australians feel about authority.
|
| Freedom for me, but cheering when someone else gets
| caught by the police when they are breaking the law. It's
| an odd dichotomy. I don't hate it but we do seem to lack
| self awareness with a slightly English style.
| potato3732842 wrote:
| Because you're meeting the ones so content they don't
| leave.
|
| All the things people are saying here about Australians
| are the same complaints Americans in the west have about
| Californians.
| cookie_monsta wrote:
| It might be useful here to give a current example or two
| of Aussie nanny statism, just for context
| Propelloni wrote:
| LOL, that struck home. While I'm living in Germany now, I
| lived in Napoli from 2004 to 2009 and I have to agree
| with our Italian friends: Italy south of Rome is a
| markedly different country and experience.
| bufordtwain wrote:
| *Tatham
| gerdesj wrote:
| My finger slipped across most of the keyboard, or I fucked
| up.
|
| You decide!
| emmelaich wrote:
| Very close to the ISO standard sign. Black lightning on
| yellow background.
| https://www.iso.org/obp/ui#iso:grs:7010:W012
|
| Dunno why you'd use anything else.
| munificent wrote:
| In particular, WinAmp at the time used a yellow lightning bolt
| in its icon, which was on damn near every Windows machine in
| the 90s.
| ahonhn wrote:
| WinAmp's yellow lightning icon is still sitting happily in my
| Windows icon tray right this very moment. Pageant is in there
| too with its cute little spy-hat :-)
| voussoir wrote:
| It's funny, I was just thinking about this recently. I noticed
| that a lot of electric cars or PHEVs use cyan accents to signal
| that they are EVs, yet I also think yellow is the more obvious
| color for electricity.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Actually I think yellow is _only_ appropriate if it 's a
| lightning bolt. Otherwise it wouldn't make me think of
| electricity. Cyan hints is more "cyber" like Tron or
| something.
| 0xEF wrote:
| This is pure speculation on my part, but I wonder if the yellow
| lightning bolt stayed yellow in the PuTTY icon (among other
| uses) because the symbol was likely just borrowed from safety
| warnings. Yellow has been preferred for a long time since it's
| considered a high-vis color and would typically stand out on
| industrial machinery housing where you might want to clearly
| warn someone of shock hazard with a pictograph so the warning
| transcends language. The lightning bolt stayed yellow as a
| result of "that's how we've always done it, I guess" thinking
| philsnow wrote:
| In "Avatar: the Last Airbender", there's one-ish characters who
| can bend lightning, and to the credit of the animators, it is
| indeed depicted as cyan colored
| MisterTea wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymology_of_electricity
|
| > The Neo-Latin adjective electricus, originally meaning 'of
| amber'
|
| Seems like electricity and amber have been tied together for a
| long time.
|
| This rules out the idea it comes from safety signs. I also dont
| buy the safety sign origin as the graphics are always in black
| and the background is yellow.
| 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.
| laurentlb wrote:
| Putty and Winamp are two softwares that I've used for 20+ years
| on Windows and that still feel the same. They don't get old or
| outdated.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > They don't get old or outdated.
|
| SSH is a windows builtin now, so they do get outdated. :/
| jmulho wrote:
| > the more material design... I see, the more I experience
| feelings of distrust and skepticism.
|
| One of the tenets of material design seems to be that a
| rectangle should not reveal its true nature until you click on
| it. It might be a button, a text box, or just a rectangle!
| rrgok wrote:
| Any reason for that?
| tavavex wrote:
| The reason is that.. it's not, actually!
|
| Like, individual websites might do their own weird takes
| and have their own design systems which are mistaken for
| 'material design', but I don't think you can fault Google
| for making text boxes too similar to buttons.
|
| Text fields https://m3.material.io/components/text-
| fields/overview - underlined or outlined, have their title
| text
|
| Buttons https://m3.material.io/components/all-buttons -
| fully colored or outlined, may have a shadow, more rounded,
| differently-styled
| reddalo wrote:
| >the additional cohesion from using OS primitives
|
| I miss using win32 software. It was the best: simple, quick to
| render, clean and information-dense. Now everything uses large
| "modern Windows" widgets or, even worse, Electron.
| sgjohnson wrote:
| If Microsoft had instead created a modern alternative for
| Win32 that was equally performant and bullshit-free, Electron
| would have never seen the light of day.
| usrusr wrote:
| Software using the win32 graphics primitives is just so
| incredibly fast. If it looks like those, there is of course
| still the possibility that it wastes time elsewhere (or in an
| exact simulation of those looks), but it might also just be the
| real thing, as instantaneous as the old "just load a file into
| the text control, \n without preceding \r be damned!" notepad.
| (I miss having that notepad, it was so properly being just what
| it was, without any pretentions of being something different)
|
| I think I saw a notepad reimplementation in _assembly_ once:
| half a screen (or what felt like half a screen) of glue code to
| plug the file access into the text control, might have even had
| the ctrl+h menu and dialog. Just like the glue code python
| prides itself of, only that it was straight assembly, zero
| dependencies except for the DLLs for file access and the bare
| bones standard control set.
| pjc50 wrote:
| It's remarkable how Windows had a native toolkit that worked
| great, but when it needed modernizing (especially for higher
| resolutions) they repeatedly drove off a cliff in weird
| directions which are much, much heavier and also locked down
| awkwardly like UWP.
|
| The other day for meme purposes I was trying to write a
| "retro Windows style Bluesky client". I did get a timeline
| displaying but it was clear that I'd exceeded the point at
| which the toolkit was going to help and I was going to have
| to do my own word wrap etc for owner-draw listbox entries.
| It's still a charming aesthetic.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| > Providing a plain black-and-white version was another standard
| recommendation at the time. But I can't remember why - I
| certainly never actually saw a computer running Win95 or later
| with a B&W display!
|
| Windows 95 can be convinced to run in monochrome:
| http://toastytech.com/guis/miscw95bw.png (from
| http://toastytech.com/guis/misc2.html)
| samstave wrote:
| One of my "hero memories" was a time when I was a master of
| Win95 - and a friend had accidentally changed ALL of her
| display options to black - so all the UI was black, but I knew
| Win95 so well I could navigate the entire OS via keyboard - and
| was able to from memory navigate through the start menu, to
| settings, knowing how many tabs to hit to get to display and
| change that back to default.
|
| The people watching thought I was a magician.
|
| (I also had several sealed original W95 boxes on floppies...(we
| shutdown an office, and as IT mgr - I had to go liquidate - and
| we had ~50 boxes of original release W95s there - so I took
| several home) and I held them for ~10+ years then sold them on
| eBay, I only got $25 for each - but I sold them as pieces of
| "computing history")
| Aeolun wrote:
| What I think is amazing is that W95 fit on a set of floppies.
| I think the only installation medium I've ever seen for it
| was a CD-ROM.
| samstave wrote:
| CDroms were a luxury addon when W95 was released - but
| every machine had a 3.5
|
| I want to say it was in the ~20 disk range...
|
| There were a lot of really fun things that happened with
| W95 - a lot of "mischevious" cyberwar...
|
| Like taking image of desktop as background came out with
| that - so nothing was clickable as a prank.
|
| There were several backdoor utils
|
| There were several prank links to something that seemed
| serious/work -- but then switched to a really loud voice
| yelling "IM WATCHING P*RN"
|
| (The backdoor utils were really powerful though, and they
| remind me of a thing I am doing with Cursor/Claude -- Agent
| mode access to a fresh windows laptop as admin and having
| the bot fully config my new windows machine to my specs.
| Lammy wrote:
| There was a little magic to make that happen too
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_Media_Format
| jamesfinlayson wrote:
| Oh, I vaguely remember this from when floppy disks were
| still around (though not by the name DMF) - I remember
| them having a 1.44MB capacity but some smart people
| reformatted their floppy disks to get it up to 1.68MB.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| Windows 95 came on 13 floppies. That version excluded most
| fancy features, you can't compress ~360 MB to ~22.
|
| Windows 11 could also "fit on a set of floppies" - although
| thousands of floppies would be completely absurd, it is not
| impossible.
| ekaryotic wrote:
| monochrome displays were common in low end laptops, but they
| were so expensive there weren't many around.
| reactordev wrote:
| PuTTY icons stand the test of time. Literally looks like it's out
| of 1996. While SVG versions are nice, it would have been a great
| opportunity to introduce a cleaner, more modern style. I digress
| though, I bet people would riot because they can't find it in
| their start menu.
|
| Congrats on the revamp. My ADD pixel brain always looked at the
| lightning bolt with cringe as it activates my OCD "pixel lines
| need to be perfect".
| mjg59 wrote:
| > So I wrote a piece of code that drew all the components of each
| icon image in a programmatic way
|
| I was fortunate enough to spend a bunch of time hanging out with
| Simon in the 2000s and learned a great deal about a bewildering
| array of topics, and the above is _such_ a representative example
| of the way he approaches problems.
| colmmacc wrote:
| This brings back memories! Sometime around 2000 I forked PuTTY
| and made a version called "RedBrick PuTTy" that featured a one-
| click button to ssh to redbrick.dcu.ie - Dublin City University
| Networking Society's terminal server. I was one of the sysadmins
| at the time, or maybe the webmaster, I can't remember.
|
| But I do remember hand-editing the logo, to feature a red brick!
| You can just about make it out in this image ...
|
| https://wiki.redbrick.dcu.ie/images/b/b8/Putty_configuration...
|
| This dumb little fork got us from about 5% ssh usage (instead of
| Telnet) to basically 100%. Many thanks to Simon for using a
| license that let me do it.
| dontTREATonme wrote:
| Gotta say something is lost moving from Bitmap to svg, there's a
| certain charm to the "graininess" of bitmap
| andai wrote:
| I like the pixel art better, but I think there's more to it
| than that. You can't just do a 1:1 translation and expect good
| results. (Also, it's not 1:1, the outlines are way thinner in
| SVG.)
|
| With low res art, your imagination fills in the gaps. The
| higher the resolution, the higher the quality you need. (Vector
| art has infinite resolution by definition.)
| mewse-hn wrote:
| Yes! I don't know why outlines in pixel art are so often
| screwed up when up-scaled to high DPI - it's the reason I
| install posy's mouse cursors on my high dpi windows machines,
| they look as close to the old pixel cursors as possible
| bandrami wrote:
| This is stretching my geriatric memory, but I _thought_ that the
| reason for the alternate b &w icon at the time was for printers
| because PCL would choke on color ones
| smackeyacky wrote:
| Monochrome laptops were a thing
| mnky9800n wrote:
| Putty should have a gallery of user submitted icons. It would be
| great to see all the different ideas people have to update what I
| consider iconic iconography.
| kccqzy wrote:
| > Windows was defaulting to displaying 48 x 48 icons instead of
| 32 x 32 [...] I found that MacOS wanted a 128 x 128 icon to use
| in the dock
|
| This was one of the most superficial and yet most visceral reason
| I switched from Windows to Mac OS X at that time. With 128 x 128
| icons, the entry point to apps--their icon in Finder or the Dock
| --simply looked more appealing and viscerally more beautiful.
| Especially that Windows app icons used fewer colors than Mac
| apps. Of course there were many other reasons I switched, but
| seeing the desktop of the Mac for the first time, the icons
| definitely wowed me enough to give it a deeper look.
| gregfjohnson wrote:
| PuTTY is a supurb tool. Thank you so much for your efforts over
| the years.
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