11 ms·

Windows 98 Icons (2015)

214 points by keepamovin 3y ago

xanathar 3y ago
From a cursory (icony?) view, it seems to be missing the ones from moricons.dll, but memory is foggy and it might be that moricons.dll had been dropped by win98. It's been 26 years, wouldn't be surprised to find my memory is wrong.
- duskwuff 3y ago
  MORICONS.DLL is still present in current versions of Windows! But (AFAIK) none of the icons were ever updated after Windows 3.1 to conform to newer design standards, so it's reasonable to leave them out of a set of "Windows 98" icons.
  - Dwedit 3y ago
    There are a few MSIE web icons in there too that would not have been in Windows 3.1.
- hnlmorg 3y ago
  I’m pretty certain Microsoft wouldn’t have dropped it in Win98. In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if that file is still shipped. Thanks for the trip down memory lane too. It’s been years since I’ve last thought about moricons.dll. Possibly even decades. For those who haven’t heard of it: https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/6705/what-are-the-software-logos-in-moricons-dll https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/6705/what... Edit: looks like it is still available https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moricons.dll https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moricons.dll
  - thegabriele 3y ago
    Yep, I still open moreicons.dll everytime I need a fancy icon for a script shortcut
Dalewyn 3y ago
I miss when icons were still useful descriptors.
akx 3y ago
Related: I've written a thing that can automate extracting various resources (icons, cursors, bitmaps, sounds) from vintage Windowses: https://github.com/akx/res-extract https://github.com/akx/res-extract ... originally because someone needed the Excel 95 icon as a Slack emoji, naturally.
qwerty456127 3y ago
I've seen this and am amazed, also obviously grateful for the job, nevertheless I dream (I don't demand, this is just a dream) of a way better library including also all the icons from all the prominent apps and libraries of all the Windows eras since Windows 3.x. I mean also MS Office and Visual Studio to say the least. Ideally every single one should be accompanied with upscaled versions up to 512x512px. This all probably is very questionable from the legal point of view but I have courage to hope nobody is going to care busting us as long as we only use these in small personal projects just a handful of people sees. I even hope there will one day be a Dall-E-like neural network which would take a prompt and produce icons in Windows 3.x/98 style in any resolution you might need (i.e. up to whatever it takes to make a big icon on a Retina display). Long live vapourwave! :-)
- etaioinshrdlu 3y ago
  I think a fine-tune of SD or SDXL would be perfectly able to produce such images. I would also like to see this.
- qwerty456127 3y ago
  > I mean also MS Office and Visual Studio to say the least. And when I these I don't mean only the specific apps and file types logos but also the icons which could be placed on the toolbars, icons used in the dialogs etc.
srvmshr 3y ago
Getting reminded of late 90s & early 2000s design choices, the glassy feel of Bluecurve icon themes of Redhat Linux looked way ahead of their competition [1] Most people didn't have access to Classic Macs OS 8.5~9, which probably had beautiful icon sets too (Aqua?). As a highschooler, this looked so futuristic & colorful as compared to 2000/XP desktop themes & icons. EDIT: Adding as postscript: Is there anything similar which would come close to Bluecurve today? TIA if there is anything in reader's minds. 1. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/71/GNOME_2.2_on_Red_Hat_Linux_9_--_2003-02.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/71/GNOME_2.... 2. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b8/Fedora-yarrow-bluecurve.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b8/Fedora-y...
- mdasen 3y ago
  Bluecurve was amazing. For me, nothing in the Linux world has equaled it since. It was so nice and polished with thoughtful colors and design. It was quite similar in colors to Mac OS 8 & 9 (the platinum gray, the purple-ish blue).
  - mjhagen 3y ago
    Reminds me a bit of BeOS as well.
    - pndy 3y ago
      It's the icons angle and that thin black border around images, I believe
    - prmoustache 3y ago
      Yeah I loved the beos icons too
  - srvmshr 3y ago
    I sort of agree with that. That was the peak Linux GUI we saw (at least so far). Sadly after the Gnome GTK2 vs GTK3 forks, none of the child products carried the same finesse as Gnome 2.4/Bluecurve. They were sharp, colorful and vibrant. Windows icons seemed more 'classic' versus the KDE-inspired Bluecurve, Clearlooks which were more playful.
taspeotis 3y ago
Remember when they followed up with Visual Studio 2012?
anilakar 3y ago
Seeing these in 48 * 48 feels uncanny. 32 pixels was the norm back then.
- infotainment 3y ago
  I remember feeling like such a power user when I discovered I could set the icons to 48x48 back then.
Dwedit 3y ago
In Windows 95, even if you authored an icon containing more than 16 colors, it would still be displayed as a 16-color icon. (With a strange exception that there were 4 additional colors that could appear in icons, including another gray, a greenish gray, sky blue, and a nearly white color) Then finally Windows 98 updates the shell to actually support full-color icons, and this was a big deal. I think Microsoft Plus for Windows 95 also added this feature as well.
- Lammy 3y ago
  You can do it for free with [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\WindowsMetrics] "Shell Icon BPP"="16" "24" and "32" should also work as values if you have a capable adapter+display combination.
ideasphere 3y ago
‘Tree’ has always been my go-to. How about you?
dheera 3y ago
It's funny how that shade of teal green went super out of fashion for many years but it's now a "hot" color again on Android material design apps.
- p0w3n3d 3y ago
  the same with fashion all around
p0w3n3d 3y ago
Before I tried to make my own, I had been convinced that an icon is just a resized large image. For me up to this moment, it's amazing, how hard is to create an icon or pixel art. How every pixel counts, how the creator needs to manage the shades, gradients, and sometimes two pixels will show for example the white and the pupil of the eye.
- timeon 3y ago
  This might sound contradictory, but constraints are boosters for creativity.
  - KineticLensman 3y ago
    Yeah! I had to fix a shed roof during one of the lockdowns when DIY stores were closed and amazed myself with what I managed to achieve with just the scraps i had lying around
    - yitchelle 3y ago
      When I was younger, a senior told me that If all you have is a hammer to solve the problem, all problems will start to look like a nail.
- wanderingstan 3y ago
  Imagine going back to Susan Kare's shoes in 1983, having to design icons in black and white in only 32x32 pixels. Made even harder by the fact that people had never encountered icons on a screen before. https://archive.org/details/paint.net-macintosh-icons https://archive.org/details/paint.net-macintosh-icons
  - keepamovin 3y ago
    Yes. her designs are truly iconic. So charming. A good icon seems like a good invention, something that has always existed, speaks to you directly and seems to have been recalled rather than created for the first time. I think the nostalgia over some retro OSes is warranted.
Kwpolska 3y ago
Some of those icons are from 2000/Me, such as the round recycle bin with blue arrows, or the computer and network icons with cyan screens.
jim180 3y ago
There is a repo[0] with Win98 icons (no complete, I think) in higher resolution. [0] https://www.opencode.net/nestoris/Win98SE https://www.opencode.net/nestoris/Win98SE
- theandrewbailey 3y ago
  > Enhanced Classic icon theme (used with Win98 Second Edition, WinME, Win2K systems) from MicroSoft Memphis project for GNU/Linux inspired by Chicago95 theme (actually it’s a manual copy-paste fork) of Grassmunk with icons in Windows 98 SE style added and/or created by myself. Hey, Chicago95! My favorite XFCE theme! https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95
  - zozbot234 3y ago
    Chicago95 is nice, but these days you should also install the (experimental) GTK+4 theme from b00merang https://github.com/B00merang-Project/Windows-95 https://github.com/B00merang-Project/Windows-95 to get proper styling in the latest apps. That repo also has configs for Cinnamon, GNOME-Shell and MATE desktops in addition to the Xfce which Chicago95 also provides. (Unfortunately it has not been updated for some time, whereas Chicago95 is more up to date.)
  - jim180 3y ago
    While I do not use Linux, however I have installed Xubuntu to the virtual machine, just to play with this theme. Loved it!
hooby 3y ago
Just out of curiosity - why are there so many duplicates? Like 4 nearly identical IE icons. 6 very similar PC+Keyboard icons. 6 very similar trashes?
- anilakar 3y ago
  They are from earlier releases. Microsoft likes to keep old features around forever for compatibility, so 98 has icons from 95 and 95 OSR2.
  - seba_dos1 3y ago
    To the contrary, this set includes mostly icons from 98, but there are also some from 2000/Me, plus also some icons with "cool" in their filename that I don't know where they're from. I don't think there are icons from earlier releases there. [edit] Apparently the "cool" ones are from 98 beta builds (1351-1569) that didn't end up being ever used in actual release.
- seba_dos1 3y ago
  Most of them are just variations that would be used with different display color modes, as 24-bit color displays weren't ubiquitous yet back then. There are also some icons there from later versions than 98.
  - hnlmorg 3y ago
    I think they're 4 and 8 bit. "true colour" icons weren't available in Windows 98.
- hnlmorg 3y ago
  This was asked elsewhere. There's a few reasons for duplicates, like crude animations. I wrote a more detailed reply here -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39814557 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39814557
hlandau 3y ago
Still nice icons. Love the clarity and detailed shading of them at the pixel level, which is not something we see today with "flat" vector design. It is kind of amusing how the printer icons when I come to think about it are actually visually referencing 10BASE2/10BASE5.
- Sharlin 3y ago
  Funnily the original Win95 versions of these were flat shaded without gradients, designed with 16-color mode in mind. IIRC these 256-color shaded variants were added in a service pack? Or the Plus pack? And then came with Win98 by default.
5350-uiop-1130 3y ago
the lack of font and icon smoothing in old windows was always off-putting apple and linux fonts/icons always looked much nicer to me
- prima-facie 3y ago
  I don't find the initial Cleartype algorithm used by Windows to be exactly good either. You could tell from miles away that it's distorting fonts significantly in order to fit them into the pixel matrix. I think they've improved it for Windows 10/11 though.
  - baal80spam 3y ago
    > You could tell from miles away that it's distorting fonts significantly in order to fit them into the pixel matrix. You could? To me, the jump from Windows 98 to Windows 2000 was MASSIVE when it comes to readability.
    - prima-facie 3y ago
      I'm referring to the original Cleartype introduced around Windows XP - if I recall correctly. The hinting used was quite aggressive.
zokier 3y ago
This icon seems oddly out of place among all the others, and I don't recall it from the era.. Does anyone know where it was used? https://win98icons.alexmeub.com/icons/png/computer_2_cool-3.png https://win98icons.alexmeub.com/icons/png/computer_2_cool-3....
- dfox 3y ago
  That is one of the 16bpp high-resolution icons that came with Plus for 95 and IIRC by default with NT4. So the most probable place where you would see that is NT4 desktop (and indeed it looked somewhat out of place).
- wrzlbrmpft 3y ago
  Windows 95 Plus? https://oldwindowsicons.tumblr.com/post/655069899824185344/windows-95-plus-my-computer https://oldwindowsicons.tumblr.com/post/655069899824185344/w...
LeoPanthera 3y ago
Personally, I always slightly preferred the 16-color Windows 95 icons. Something about them made them a little cleaner, clearer, and quicker to identify to me.
alex_duf 3y ago
I find it so interesting how many of the symbol used are with objects that have or that will disappear from our lives. A camcorder, a floppy disk, a CD-ROM, a film (for a camera), maybe even the fountain pen. All of which I can recognise, but all of which will probably leave my daughters baffled if I were to ask them what it was...
- taco-hands 3y ago
  THAT telephone modem icon!
- nonrandomstring 3y ago
  > I find it so interesting how many of the symbol used are with objects that have or that will disappear from our lives. It is interesting how iconography links to timeless design. Function and appearance have a way of coexisting in good design so the "idea" of something gets into semiotics. Disk storage is a timeless concept. It's absent now but will no doubt return in some new guise on the next wave of materials science and storage tech. The pen is timeless too. Perhaps the weird one is the classic phone handset. My daughter who never saw one except maybe on a cartoon, instantly knew what to do with an old 1970s rotary I was hacking. The design "reaches out" and suggests its usage. Partly that's our monkey brains that sees tools and uses in everything.
  - stavros 3y ago
    I'm surprised your daughter knew what to do. I made a rotary mobile phone and showed it off in an exhibition, and kids were universally baffled. They tried to press the numbers in the wheel, then they tried to turn it without picking up the handset (why would they pick up first, everyone knows you dial the number and then you confirm the call), etc. How did your daughter immediately grasp those non-obvious, hidden concepts?
    - nonrandomstring 3y ago
      Think I remember you posting this before when we had a discussion about modding old phones. I'm convinced she saw it in a cartoon like Dora or Fireman Sam. But didn't hesitate to pick up the handset and put it to her ear. EDIT: Damnit I just had a flash of insight... thanks for the memory jolt. As a baby she had a modern version of something like this [0] (hope the image loads for you). They still make them almost the same. It's a "walker/activity toy" with a rotary dial that made a sound and a phone handset. [0] https://i.pinimg.com/originals/fd/28/21/fd28216d19251b2d7895dbb078f8da54.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/originals/fd/28/21/fd28216d19251b2d7895...
larschdk 3y ago
Such an effective design. I immediately recognize even subtle difference between icons at the lowest sizes. Meanwhile, today I get lost on my Android phone and in most desktop applications with low-contrast and monochrome icons.
- gwervc 3y ago
  Flat and monochrome icons have lost so much expressivity they are basically useless to express what they stand for. A lot of time I had to think for a moment while having the name of a menu written to make the connection between the image and the feature.
- biofox 3y ago
  I recently had this problem after downloading the latest version of GIMP and becoming frustrated trying to decipher the default low-contrast icon set: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/MwVjEL1dNWg/maxresdefault.jpg https://i.ytimg.com/vi/MwVjEL1dNWg/maxresdefault.jpg
  - larschdk 3y ago
    GIMP is my pet-peeve as well. I literally have to "read" each icon to find the one I'm looking for. Luckily you can change back to the color set, which is a lot better, although not perfect.
- wildrhythms 3y ago
  I despise the current trend of hieroglyph icons.
HenryBemis 3y ago
Thank you!!!
nsjames 3y ago
I can't believe how good it feels to navigate this UI. I'm not even sure if it's just nostalgic. The UX was damn good.
imathew 3y ago
In around 1997 I installed I think Red Hat 4.x because I'd seen screenshots of the Enlightenment window manager and wanted that beauty on my desktop. Now all I want is the Windows 98 look and feel back, when icons and user controls were clear and legible and consistent and you could drag a window from anywhere on a title bar.
- tracker1 3y ago
  I'd hate to be stuck with those tiny icons on a 4k display though. The problem is properly scaling pixel iconography doesn't work so well across a lot of devices. I've seen some legacy fixed size games in tiny windows. If hate the os to be like that. My vision isn't good enough.
myfonj 3y ago
If you yearn to see those icons with crisp zoomed pixels without blurry aliasing, try this makeshift viewer of the source sprite image (https://win98icons.alexmeub.com/css_sprites.png https://win98icons.alexmeub.com/css_sprites.png): data:text/html;verbatim,<body> <script>document.body.style.setProperty('--dpr',devicePixelRatio);</script> <img src="https://win98icons.alexmeub.com/css_sprites.png" style="image-rendering:crisp-edges; background-color:grey; width:calc(1/var(--dpr)*2168px*5);"> It forces it to map to physical device display pixels and use nearest-neighbour scaling; the last number there sets it to display each source pixel as 5×5 square in your browser's window.
- myfonj 3y ago
  * Oh, for webkit-based browsers, please replace `crisp-edges` with `pixelated`. I've just blindly trusted MDN compatibility data table [1] and did not verify it myself, and obviously there was a catch X[ Here is better cross-browser compatible version with sharp "pixels" for Chrome/Edge: data:text/html;verbatim,<body> <script>document.body.style.setProperty('--dpr',devicePixelRatio);</script> <img src="https://win98icons.alexmeub.com/css_sprites.png" style="background-color:grey; image-rendering:-webkit-optimize-contrast; image-rendering:pixelated; image-rendering:crisp-edges; width:calc(1/var(--dpr)*2168px*5);"> Sorry for the inconvenience! (And welcome to peculiarities of front-end web development. It is the year 2024 and there are still CSS level 3 modules that are not implemented reliably in latest browser versions, apparently.) [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/image-rendering#browser_compatibility https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/image-rende...
- didntcheck 3y ago
  Are there any image formats that do support a metadata hint instructing the viewer to use NN scaling? It would be useful for pixel artists, versus the current requirement to manually scale your final export (although compression should make the file size difference minimal)
nercury 3y ago
That disappearing scrollbar is weirdly out of place.
victorbohr 3y ago
I'm missing the icons from pifmgr.dll in this list. Always used those to make my shortcuts look cool.
jwmoz 3y ago
Iconic design. Have used mac since around 2012 but would happily use this Windows again.
atum47 3y ago
Are they free to use? I have some in my website but i don't even remember where i got them. I just started using it hoping that nobody would sue me.
- tracker1 3y ago
  I used to use the bricks pattern as a web background tile along with transparent GIF for graffiti titles... Used to love the effect.
0dayz 3y ago
This might just be me but I'm surprised how many icons are quite confusing in that certain icons either look very similar to another one (a lot if them literally are just glued together) or shares similar colors. It's probably one thing I actually like more about the XP or Linux (KDE) iconset.
- thinkingemote 3y ago
  Yeah agreed. For most people screens were smaller and the resolutions back then were bigger so perhaps the icons were easier to see, compared to now ?
- hnlmorg 3y ago
  There are a few things at play: - Some of them are the same icon but the slightly more modern counterpart (ie where more colours were supported - Some of them are the same icon but in different states (eg empty recycle bin vs non-empty recycle bin) - Some are actually intended to be used as crude animations (eg the 4 icons of magnifying glass over the computer are actually just 4 frames of an animation) - Plus pixels were "bigger" back then so you had to do more with less. But thankfully subtle changes were also more noticeable (again, because pixels were "bigger")
hacker_88 3y ago
Does Microsoft still have © on this?
alexvoda 3y ago
Frankly, I think the BeOS and afterwards Haiku icons are way better and more consistent.
deleted 3y ago
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deleted 3y ago
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ChrisArchitect 3y ago
Discussion on the related blog post a year ago: Windows 98 Icons are Great (2015) https://alexmeub.com/old-windows-icons/ https://alexmeub.com/old-windows-icons/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34394414 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34394414)

214 points by keepamovin 3y ago

From a cursory (icony?) view, it seems to be missing the ones from moricons.dll, but memory is foggy and it might be that moricons.dll had been dropped by win98. It's been 26 years, wouldn't be surprised to find my memory is wrong.

duskwuff 3y ago
MORICONS.DLL is still present in current versions of Windows! But (AFAIK) none of the icons were ever updated after Windows 3.1 to conform to newer design standards, so it's reasonable to leave them out of a set of "Windows 98" icons.
- Dwedit 3y ago
  There are a few MSIE web icons in there too that would not have been in Windows 3.1.
hnlmorg 3y ago
I’m pretty certain Microsoft wouldn’t have dropped it in Win98. In fact I wouldn’t be surprised if that file is still shipped. Thanks for the trip down memory lane too. It’s been years since I’ve last thought about moricons.dll. Possibly even decades. For those who haven’t heard of it: https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/6705/what-are-the-software-logos-in-moricons-dll https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/6705/what... Edit: looks like it is still available https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moricons.dll https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moricons.dll
- thegabriele 3y ago
  Yep, I still open moreicons.dll everytime I need a fancy icon for a script shortcut

Dalewyn 3y ago

I miss when icons were still useful descriptors.

akx 3y ago

Related: I've written a thing that can automate extracting various resources (icons, cursors, bitmaps, sounds) from vintage Windowses: https://github.com/akx/res-extract https://github.com/akx/res-extract ... originally because someone needed the Excel 95 icon as a Slack emoji, naturally.

qwerty456127 3y ago

I've seen this and am amazed, also obviously grateful for the job, nevertheless I dream (I don't demand, this is just a dream) of a way better library including also all the icons from all the prominent apps and libraries of all the Windows eras since Windows 3.x. I mean also MS Office and Visual Studio to say the least. Ideally every single one should be accompanied with upscaled versions up to 512x512px. This all probably is very questionable from the legal point of view but I have courage to hope nobody is going to care busting us as long as we only use these in small personal projects just a handful of people sees. I even hope there will one day be a Dall-E-like neural network which would take a prompt and produce icons in Windows 3.x/98 style in any resolution you might need (i.e. up to whatever it takes to make a big icon on a Retina display). Long live vapourwave! :-)

etaioinshrdlu 3y ago
I think a fine-tune of SD or SDXL would be perfectly able to produce such images. I would also like to see this.
qwerty456127 3y ago
> I mean also MS Office and Visual Studio to say the least. And when I these I don't mean only the specific apps and file types logos but also the icons which could be placed on the toolbars, icons used in the dialogs etc.

srvmshr 3y ago

Getting reminded of late 90s & early 2000s design choices, the glassy feel of Bluecurve icon themes of Redhat Linux looked way ahead of their competition [1] Most people didn't have access to Classic Macs OS 8.5~9, which probably had beautiful icon sets too (Aqua?). As a highschooler, this looked so futuristic & colorful as compared to 2000/XP desktop themes & icons. EDIT: Adding as postscript: Is there anything similar which would come close to Bluecurve today? TIA if there is anything in reader's minds. 1. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/71/GNOME_2.2_on_Red_Hat_Linux_9_--_2003-02.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/71/GNOME_2.... 2. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b8/Fedora-yarrow-bluecurve.png https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b8/Fedora-y...

mdasen 3y ago
Bluecurve was amazing. For me, nothing in the Linux world has equaled it since. It was so nice and polished with thoughtful colors and design. It was quite similar in colors to Mac OS 8 & 9 (the platinum gray, the purple-ish blue).
- mjhagen 3y ago
  Reminds me a bit of BeOS as well.
  - pndy 3y ago
    It's the icons angle and that thin black border around images, I believe
  - prmoustache 3y ago
    Yeah I loved the beos icons too
- srvmshr 3y ago
  I sort of agree with that. That was the peak Linux GUI we saw (at least so far). Sadly after the Gnome GTK2 vs GTK3 forks, none of the child products carried the same finesse as Gnome 2.4/Bluecurve. They were sharp, colorful and vibrant. Windows icons seemed more 'classic' versus the KDE-inspired Bluecurve, Clearlooks which were more playful.

taspeotis 3y ago

Remember when they followed up with Visual Studio 2012?

anilakar 3y ago

Seeing these in 48 * 48 feels uncanny. 32 pixels was the norm back then.

infotainment 3y ago
I remember feeling like such a power user when I discovered I could set the icons to 48x48 back then.

Dwedit 3y ago

In Windows 95, even if you authored an icon containing more than 16 colors, it would still be displayed as a 16-color icon. (With a strange exception that there were 4 additional colors that could appear in icons, including another gray, a greenish gray, sky blue, and a nearly white color) Then finally Windows 98 updates the shell to actually support full-color icons, and this was a big deal. I think Microsoft Plus for Windows 95 also added this feature as well.

Lammy 3y ago
You can do it for free with [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\WindowsMetrics] "Shell Icon BPP"="16" "24" and "32" should also work as values if you have a capable adapter+display combination.

ideasphere 3y ago

‘Tree’ has always been my go-to. How about you?

dheera 3y ago

It's funny how that shade of teal green went super out of fashion for many years but it's now a "hot" color again on Android material design apps.

p0w3n3d 3y ago
the same with fashion all around

p0w3n3d 3y ago

Before I tried to make my own, I had been convinced that an icon is just a resized large image. For me up to this moment, it's amazing, how hard is to create an icon or pixel art. How every pixel counts, how the creator needs to manage the shades, gradients, and sometimes two pixels will show for example the white and the pupil of the eye.

timeon 3y ago
This might sound contradictory, but constraints are boosters for creativity.
- KineticLensman 3y ago
  Yeah! I had to fix a shed roof during one of the lockdowns when DIY stores were closed and amazed myself with what I managed to achieve with just the scraps i had lying around
  - yitchelle 3y ago
    When I was younger, a senior told me that If all you have is a hammer to solve the problem, all problems will start to look like a nail.
wanderingstan 3y ago
Imagine going back to Susan Kare's shoes in 1983, having to design icons in black and white in only 32x32 pixels. Made even harder by the fact that people had never encountered icons on a screen before. https://archive.org/details/paint.net-macintosh-icons https://archive.org/details/paint.net-macintosh-icons
- keepamovin 3y ago
  Yes. her designs are truly iconic. So charming. A good icon seems like a good invention, something that has always existed, speaks to you directly and seems to have been recalled rather than created for the first time. I think the nostalgia over some retro OSes is warranted.

Kwpolska 3y ago

Some of those icons are from 2000/Me, such as the round recycle bin with blue arrows, or the computer and network icons with cyan screens.

jim180 3y ago

There is a repo[0] with Win98 icons (no complete, I think) in higher resolution. [0] https://www.opencode.net/nestoris/Win98SE https://www.opencode.net/nestoris/Win98SE

theandrewbailey 3y ago
> Enhanced Classic icon theme (used with Win98 Second Edition, WinME, Win2K systems) from MicroSoft Memphis project for GNU/Linux inspired by Chicago95 theme (actually it’s a manual copy-paste fork) of Grassmunk with icons in Windows 98 SE style added and/or created by myself. Hey, Chicago95! My favorite XFCE theme! https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95 https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95
- zozbot234 3y ago
  Chicago95 is nice, but these days you should also install the (experimental) GTK+4 theme from b00merang https://github.com/B00merang-Project/Windows-95 https://github.com/B00merang-Project/Windows-95 to get proper styling in the latest apps. That repo also has configs for Cinnamon, GNOME-Shell and MATE desktops in addition to the Xfce which Chicago95 also provides. (Unfortunately it has not been updated for some time, whereas Chicago95 is more up to date.)
- jim180 3y ago
  While I do not use Linux, however I have installed Xubuntu to the virtual machine, just to play with this theme. Loved it!

hooby 3y ago

Just out of curiosity - why are there so many duplicates? Like 4 nearly identical IE icons. 6 very similar PC+Keyboard icons. 6 very similar trashes?

anilakar 3y ago
They are from earlier releases. Microsoft likes to keep old features around forever for compatibility, so 98 has icons from 95 and 95 OSR2.
- seba_dos1 3y ago
  To the contrary, this set includes mostly icons from 98, but there are also some from 2000/Me, plus also some icons with "cool" in their filename that I don't know where they're from. I don't think there are icons from earlier releases there. [edit] Apparently the "cool" ones are from 98 beta builds (1351-1569) that didn't end up being ever used in actual release.
seba_dos1 3y ago
Most of them are just variations that would be used with different display color modes, as 24-bit color displays weren't ubiquitous yet back then. There are also some icons there from later versions than 98.
- hnlmorg 3y ago
  I think they're 4 and 8 bit. "true colour" icons weren't available in Windows 98.
hnlmorg 3y ago
This was asked elsewhere. There's a few reasons for duplicates, like crude animations. I wrote a more detailed reply here -> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39814557 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39814557

hlandau 3y ago

Still nice icons. Love the clarity and detailed shading of them at the pixel level, which is not something we see today with "flat" vector design. It is kind of amusing how the printer icons when I come to think about it are actually visually referencing 10BASE2/10BASE5.

Sharlin 3y ago
Funnily the original Win95 versions of these were flat shaded without gradients, designed with 16-color mode in mind. IIRC these 256-color shaded variants were added in a service pack? Or the Plus pack? And then came with Win98 by default.

5350-uiop-1130 3y ago

the lack of font and icon smoothing in old windows was always off-putting apple and linux fonts/icons always looked much nicer to me

prima-facie 3y ago
I don't find the initial Cleartype algorithm used by Windows to be exactly good either. You could tell from miles away that it's distorting fonts significantly in order to fit them into the pixel matrix. I think they've improved it for Windows 10/11 though.
- baal80spam 3y ago
  > You could tell from miles away that it's distorting fonts significantly in order to fit them into the pixel matrix. You could? To me, the jump from Windows 98 to Windows 2000 was MASSIVE when it comes to readability.
  - prima-facie 3y ago
    I'm referring to the original Cleartype introduced around Windows XP - if I recall correctly. The hinting used was quite aggressive.

zokier 3y ago

This icon seems oddly out of place among all the others, and I don't recall it from the era.. Does anyone know where it was used? https://win98icons.alexmeub.com/icons/png/computer_2_cool-3.png https://win98icons.alexmeub.com/icons/png/computer_2_cool-3....

dfox 3y ago
That is one of the 16bpp high-resolution icons that came with Plus for 95 and IIRC by default with NT4. So the most probable place where you would see that is NT4 desktop (and indeed it looked somewhat out of place).
wrzlbrmpft 3y ago
Windows 95 Plus? https://oldwindowsicons.tumblr.com/post/655069899824185344/windows-95-plus-my-computer https://oldwindowsicons.tumblr.com/post/655069899824185344/w...

LeoPanthera 3y ago

Personally, I always slightly preferred the 16-color Windows 95 icons. Something about them made them a little cleaner, clearer, and quicker to identify to me.

alex_duf 3y ago

I find it so interesting how many of the symbol used are with objects that have or that will disappear from our lives. A camcorder, a floppy disk, a CD-ROM, a film (for a camera), maybe even the fountain pen. All of which I can recognise, but all of which will probably leave my daughters baffled if I were to ask them what it was...

taco-hands 3y ago
THAT telephone modem icon!
nonrandomstring 3y ago
> I find it so interesting how many of the symbol used are with objects that have or that will disappear from our lives. It is interesting how iconography links to timeless design. Function and appearance have a way of coexisting in good design so the "idea" of something gets into semiotics. Disk storage is a timeless concept. It's absent now but will no doubt return in some new guise on the next wave of materials science and storage tech. The pen is timeless too. Perhaps the weird one is the classic phone handset. My daughter who never saw one except maybe on a cartoon, instantly knew what to do with an old 1970s rotary I was hacking. The design "reaches out" and suggests its usage. Partly that's our monkey brains that sees tools and uses in everything.
- stavros 3y ago
  I'm surprised your daughter knew what to do. I made a rotary mobile phone and showed it off in an exhibition, and kids were universally baffled. They tried to press the numbers in the wheel, then they tried to turn it without picking up the handset (why would they pick up first, everyone knows you dial the number and then you confirm the call), etc. How did your daughter immediately grasp those non-obvious, hidden concepts?
  - nonrandomstring 3y ago
    Think I remember you posting this before when we had a discussion about modding old phones. I'm convinced she saw it in a cartoon like Dora or Fireman Sam. But didn't hesitate to pick up the handset and put it to her ear. EDIT: Damnit I just had a flash of insight... thanks for the memory jolt. As a baby she had a modern version of something like this [0] (hope the image loads for you). They still make them almost the same. It's a "walker/activity toy" with a rotary dial that made a sound and a phone handset. [0] https://i.pinimg.com/originals/fd/28/21/fd28216d19251b2d7895dbb078f8da54.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/originals/fd/28/21/fd28216d19251b2d7895...

larschdk 3y ago

Such an effective design. I immediately recognize even subtle difference between icons at the lowest sizes. Meanwhile, today I get lost on my Android phone and in most desktop applications with low-contrast and monochrome icons.

gwervc 3y ago
Flat and monochrome icons have lost so much expressivity they are basically useless to express what they stand for. A lot of time I had to think for a moment while having the name of a menu written to make the connection between the image and the feature.
biofox 3y ago
I recently had this problem after downloading the latest version of GIMP and becoming frustrated trying to decipher the default low-contrast icon set: https://i.ytimg.com/vi/MwVjEL1dNWg/maxresdefault.jpg https://i.ytimg.com/vi/MwVjEL1dNWg/maxresdefault.jpg
- larschdk 3y ago
  GIMP is my pet-peeve as well. I literally have to "read" each icon to find the one I'm looking for. Luckily you can change back to the color set, which is a lot better, although not perfect.
wildrhythms 3y ago
I despise the current trend of hieroglyph icons.

HenryBemis 3y ago

Thank you!!!

nsjames 3y ago

I can't believe how good it feels to navigate this UI. I'm not even sure if it's just nostalgic. The UX was damn good.

imathew 3y ago

In around 1997 I installed I think Red Hat 4.x because I'd seen screenshots of the Enlightenment window manager and wanted that beauty on my desktop. Now all I want is the Windows 98 look and feel back, when icons and user controls were clear and legible and consistent and you could drag a window from anywhere on a title bar.

tracker1 3y ago
I'd hate to be stuck with those tiny icons on a 4k display though. The problem is properly scaling pixel iconography doesn't work so well across a lot of devices. I've seen some legacy fixed size games in tiny windows. If hate the os to be like that. My vision isn't good enough.

myfonj 3y ago

If you yearn to see those icons with crisp zoomed pixels without blurry aliasing, try this makeshift viewer of the source sprite image (https://win98icons.alexmeub.com/css_sprites.png https://win98icons.alexmeub.com/css_sprites.png): data:text/html;verbatim,<body> <script>document.body.style.setProperty('--dpr',devicePixelRatio);</script> <img src="https://win98icons.alexmeub.com/css_sprites.png" style="image-rendering:crisp-edges; background-color:grey; width:calc(1/var(--dpr)*2168px*5);"> It forces it to map to physical device display pixels and use nearest-neighbour scaling; the last number there sets it to display each source pixel as 5×5 square in your browser's window.

myfonj 3y ago
* Oh, for webkit-based browsers, please replace `crisp-edges` with `pixelated`. I've just blindly trusted MDN compatibility data table [1] and did not verify it myself, and obviously there was a catch X[ Here is better cross-browser compatible version with sharp "pixels" for Chrome/Edge: data:text/html;verbatim,<body> <script>document.body.style.setProperty('--dpr',devicePixelRatio);</script> <img src="https://win98icons.alexmeub.com/css_sprites.png" style="background-color:grey; image-rendering:-webkit-optimize-contrast; image-rendering:pixelated; image-rendering:crisp-edges; width:calc(1/var(--dpr)*2168px*5);"> Sorry for the inconvenience! (And welcome to peculiarities of front-end web development. It is the year 2024 and there are still CSS level 3 modules that are not implemented reliably in latest browser versions, apparently.) [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/image-rendering#browser_compatibility https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/image-rende...
didntcheck 3y ago
Are there any image formats that do support a metadata hint instructing the viewer to use NN scaling? It would be useful for pixel artists, versus the current requirement to manually scale your final export (although compression should make the file size difference minimal)

nercury 3y ago

That disappearing scrollbar is weirdly out of place.

victorbohr 3y ago

I'm missing the icons from pifmgr.dll in this list. Always used those to make my shortcuts look cool.

jwmoz 3y ago

Iconic design. Have used mac since around 2012 but would happily use this Windows again.

atum47 3y ago

Are they free to use? I have some in my website but i don't even remember where i got them. I just started using it hoping that nobody would sue me.

tracker1 3y ago
I used to use the bricks pattern as a web background tile along with transparent GIF for graffiti titles... Used to love the effect.

0dayz 3y ago

This might just be me but I'm surprised how many icons are quite confusing in that certain icons either look very similar to another one (a lot if them literally are just glued together) or shares similar colors. It's probably one thing I actually like more about the XP or Linux (KDE) iconset.

thinkingemote 3y ago
Yeah agreed. For most people screens were smaller and the resolutions back then were bigger so perhaps the icons were easier to see, compared to now ?
hnlmorg 3y ago
There are a few things at play: - Some of them are the same icon but the slightly more modern counterpart (ie where more colours were supported - Some of them are the same icon but in different states (eg empty recycle bin vs non-empty recycle bin) - Some are actually intended to be used as crude animations (eg the 4 icons of magnifying glass over the computer are actually just 4 frames of an animation) - Plus pixels were "bigger" back then so you had to do more with less. But thankfully subtle changes were also more noticeable (again, because pixels were "bigger")

hacker_88 3y ago

alexvoda 3y ago

Frankly, I think the BeOS and afterwards Haiku icons are way better and more consistent.

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ChrisArchitect 3y ago

Discussion on the related blog post a year ago: Windows 98 Icons are Great (2015) https://alexmeub.com/old-windows-icons/ https://alexmeub.com/old-windows-icons/ (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34394414 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34394414)