7 ms·

Iconography of the PuTTY tools

400 points by Tomte 2y ago

acheron 2y 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 2y 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 2y ago
    I would also guess that Windows 95/98 in high contrast mode had an influence.
- susam 2y 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.
  - hinkley 2y 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
    - susam 2y ago
      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 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-graphics-ibm-pc/Logo%20Programming%20with%20Turtle%20Graphics%20IBM%20PC.pdf 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/Microsoft_GW-BASIC_Users_Guide_and_Reference_1989.pdf https://bitsavers.computerhistory.org/pdf/microsoft/gw-basic... - Page 289 refers to colour 7 as white and colour 15 as high-intensity white.
      - hinkley 2y ago
        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 2y ago
  You can see several examples on this page http://toastytech.com/guis/win31.html 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 2y 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 2y ago
Thanks for the blog post, I like these personal pieces of software history
adt 2y ago
I remember this from the 90s. And I love your use of italics, Simon!
Lammy 2y 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 https://archive.org/details/forte-agent-1.6 Love reading this kind of history straight from the creator :)
- cluckindan 2y ago
  It’s from the ”Spy vs. Spy” comic strip.
- rzzzt 2y 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 https://youtu.be/h-_UNm_gycU?t=94
  - paradox460 2y ago
    For me it's the spy from the wep chips challenge game
- arantius 2y 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 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.
rzzzt 2y 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 2y 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.
- metalliqaz 2y ago
  AKA "bike-shedding"
  - rzzzt 2y 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.
    - nickpeterson 2y ago
      You should work on a new and improved filesystem implementation and name the project 'New Folder'.
    - asyx 2y ago
      I just call them what they are or do. If I ever release anything to the public I can still think of a name that makes sense.
  - somat 2y 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/ 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.
Sharlin 2y 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.
- metalliqaz 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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
    - jagged-chisel 2y ago
      DOS-based editors used a blue background often: WordPerfect, QuickC…
      - sfllaw 2y ago
RadiozRadioz 2y 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 2y 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 2y ago
    > They don't get old or outdated. SSH is a windows builtin now, so they do get outdated. :/
- jmulho 2y 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 2y ago
    Any reason for that?
    - tavavex 2y ago
      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 https://m3.material.io/components/text-fields/overview - underlined or outlined, have their title text Buttons https://m3.material.io/components/all-buttons https://m3.material.io/components/all-buttons - fully colored or outlined, may have a shadow, more rounded, differently-styled
Kwpolska 2y 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 http://toastytech.com/guis/miscw95bw.png (from http://toastytech.com/guis/misc2.html http://toastytech.com/guis/misc2.html)
- samstave 2y 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 2y 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.
    - samstave 2y ago
      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.
reactordev 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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.png 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 2y ago
Gotta say something is lost moving from Bitmap to svg, there’s a certain charm to the “graininess” of bitmap
- andai 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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
- smackeyacky 2y ago
  Monochrome laptops were a thing
mnky9800n 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y ago
PuTTY is a supurb tool. Thank you so much for your efforts over the years.

400 points by Tomte 2y 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 2y 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 2y ago
  I would also guess that Windows 95/98 in high contrast mode had an influence.
susam 2y 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.
- hinkley 2y 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
  - susam 2y ago
    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 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-graphics-ibm-pc/Logo%20Programming%20with%20Turtle%20Graphics%20IBM%20PC.pdf 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/Microsoft_GW-BASIC_Users_Guide_and_Reference_1989.pdf https://bitsavers.computerhistory.org/pdf/microsoft/gw-basic... - Page 289 refers to colour 7 as white and colour 15 as high-intensity white.
    - hinkley 2y ago
      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 2y ago
You can see several examples on this page http://toastytech.com/guis/win31.html 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 2y 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 2y ago

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

adt 2y ago

I remember this from the 90s. And I love your use of italics, Simon!

Lammy 2y 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 https://archive.org/details/forte-agent-1.6 Love reading this kind of history straight from the creator :)

cluckindan 2y ago
It’s from the ”Spy vs. Spy” comic strip.
rzzzt 2y 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 https://youtu.be/h-_UNm_gycU?t=94
- paradox460 2y ago
  For me it's the spy from the wep chips challenge game
arantius 2y 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 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.

rzzzt 2y 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 2y 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.
metalliqaz 2y ago
AKA "bike-shedding"
- rzzzt 2y 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.
  - nickpeterson 2y ago
    You should work on a new and improved filesystem implementation and name the project 'New Folder'.
  - asyx 2y ago
    I just call them what they are or do. If I ever release anything to the public I can still think of a name that makes sense.
- somat 2y 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/ 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.

Sharlin 2y 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.

metalliqaz 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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
  - jagged-chisel 2y ago
    DOS-based editors used a blue background often: WordPerfect, QuickC…
    - sfllaw 2y ago

RadiozRadioz 2y 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 2y 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 2y ago
  > They don't get old or outdated. SSH is a windows builtin now, so they do get outdated. :/
jmulho 2y 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 2y ago
  Any reason for that?
  - tavavex 2y ago
    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 https://m3.material.io/components/text-fields/overview - underlined or outlined, have their title text Buttons https://m3.material.io/components/all-buttons https://m3.material.io/components/all-buttons - fully colored or outlined, may have a shadow, more rounded, differently-styled

Kwpolska 2y 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 http://toastytech.com/guis/miscw95bw.png (from http://toastytech.com/guis/misc2.html http://toastytech.com/guis/misc2.html)

samstave 2y 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 2y 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.
  - samstave 2y ago
    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.

reactordev 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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.png 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 2y ago

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

andai 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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

smackeyacky 2y ago
Monochrome laptops were a thing

mnky9800n 2y 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 2y 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 2y 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 2y ago

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