Iconography of the PuTTY tools

https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/quasiblog/putty-icons/

by Tomte • 1 year ago

400 105 1 year ago

chiark.greenend.org.uk

acheron• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

I would also guess that Windows 95/98 in high contrast mode had an influence.

susam2• 1 year ago

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.

hinkley4• 1 year ago

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

bhaak• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

Thanks for the blog post, I like these personal pieces of software history

adt• 1 year ago

I remember this from the 90s.

And I love your use of italics, Simon!

Lammy2• 1 year ago

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 :)

cluckindan• 1 year ago

It’s from the ”Spy vs. Spy” comic strip.

rzzzt3• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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

arantius• 1 year ago

Sibling already mentions this, but the wording of the article almost directly but not quite says it's "Spy vs. Spy" based. I'm not aware of an official link to document this but

https://www.google.com/search?q=spy+vs+spy&udm=2

An image search will show you plenty copies of the inspiration for this hat.

rzzzt3• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

metalliqaz2• 1 year ago

AKA "bike-shedding"

rzzzt3• 1 year ago

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.

somat• 1 year ago

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.

ghxst• 1 year ago

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 :').

efilife• 1 year ago

What LLM do you use to help you come up with names? ChatGPT sucks at it

hinkley4• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

metalliqaz2• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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

gerdesj4• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

t0mas882• 1 year ago

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.

bufordtwain• 1 year ago

*Tatham

emmelaich• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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 :-)

opello• 1 year ago

Also vintage of the era is ZOC[1] which was a dialer and terminal emulator whose "O" used a yellow lightning bolt.

[1] https://www.os2world.com/wiki/index.php/ZOC

(The Wikipedia page for the application does not have the same splash screen that the above link does and the above is certainly the version I remember.)

voussoir• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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

MisterTea2• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

They don't get old or outdated.

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

jmulho• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

Any reason for that?

reddalo• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

usrusr2• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

Kwpolska2• 1 year ago

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)

samstave2• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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.

ekaryotic• 1 year ago

monochrome displays were common in low end laptops, but they were so expensive there weren't many around.

reactordev• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

Gotta say something is lost moving from Bitmap to svg, there’s a certain charm to the “graininess” of bitmap

andai• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

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

smackeyacky2• 1 year ago

Monochrome laptops were a thing

mnky9800n• 1 year ago

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• 1 year ago

Windows was defaulting to displaying 48 × 48 icons instead of 32 × 32 […] I found that MacOS wanted a 128 × 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 × 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.

ziml77• 1 year ago

I don't know about how it was on OS X at the time, but one of the things that really annoyed me with Windows applications was how crappy most of their icons looked. Hardly anyone seemed to care about making proper icons. Some didn't update their icons when the default size changed to 48x48, leading to them looking blurry due to the scaling up. Others included all the icon sizes but they were all just scaled down from some image that only looked good at a large size. All of the detail became muddied together in a mess of an icon at the typical icon sizes.

I would often make custom icons for applications and then use a resource editor to change them within the executable, just so I didn't have to see the ugly icons on my desktop or in my taskbar.

gregfjohnson• 1 year ago

PuTTY is a supurb tool. Thank you so much for your efforts over the years.

Iconography of the PuTTY tools

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