Iconography of the PuTTY tools
chiark.greenend.org.uk
Iconography of the PuTTY tools
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Re: Iconography of the PuTTY tools
#2He 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.
Re: Iconography of the PuTTY tools
#3He 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.
And I think that B&W made sense as back then, there would have been a number of monochrome portable computers still in service.
Re: Iconography of the PuTTY tools
#4Thanks for the blog post, I like these personal pieces of software history
Re: Iconography of the PuTTY tools
#5I remember this from the 90s.
And I love your use of italics, Simon!
Re: Iconography of the PuTTY tools
#6He 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.
And I think that B&W made sense as back then, there would have been a number of monochrome portable computers still in service.
I would also guess that Windows 95/98 in high contrast mode had an influence.
Re: Iconography of the PuTTY tools
#7He 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.
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.
Re: Iconography of the PuTTY tools
#8I wonder if the “Agent” hat iconography was inspired by Forté 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 :)
Re: Iconography of the PuTTY tools
#9This 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.
Re: Iconography of the PuTTY tools
#10I wonder if the “Agent” hat iconography was inspired by Forté 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 :)
It’s from the ”Spy vs. Spy” comic strip.