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Iconography of the PuTTY tools

chiark.greenend.org.uk

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Re: Iconography of the PuTTY tools

#51

Post by ahonhn »

munificent wrote: post #43
Sharlin wrote: post #11

> 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 b…

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.

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 :-)

Re: Iconography of the PuTTY tools

#52

Post by colmmacc »

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.

Re: Iconography of the PuTTY tools

#53

Post by jamesfinlayson »

Lammy wrote: post #42
Aeolun wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There was a little magic to make that happen too https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_Media_Format

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.

Re: Iconography of the PuTTY tools

#54

Post by jmulho »

RadiozRadioz wrote: post #16

> 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…

> 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!

Re: Iconography of the PuTTY tools

#55

Post by voussoir »

Sharlin wrote: post #11

> 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 b…

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.

Re: Iconography of the PuTTY tools

#56

Post by [deleted] »

t0mas88 wrote: post #24
gerdesj wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

[deleted]

Re: Iconography of the PuTTY tools

#58

Post by sfllaw »

jagged-chisel wrote: post #44
autoexec wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

DOS-based editors used a blue background often: WordPerfect, QuickC…

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.

Re: Iconography of the PuTTY tools

#59

Post by thaumasiotes »

laurentlb wrote: post #25
RadiozRadioz wrote: post #16

> 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…

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.

> They don't get old or outdated.

SSH is a windows builtin now, so they do get outdated. :/

Re: Iconography of the PuTTY tools

#60

Post by paradox460 »

rzzzt wrote: post #13
Lammy wrote: post #8

I 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 :)

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

For me it's the spy from the wep chips challenge game
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