A visual brief on icon history through different GUIs and operating systems | Hacker News Reader

A visual brief on icon history through different GUIs and operating systems

historyoficons.com

15 pointsjfaucett11 comments

Anecdote, and a billion times more interesting than that overview of Windows icons and a sales pitch:

When I was at university a long long time ago, I took a class in user interfaces and usability, and in one lecture the professor showed us an icon set from some system made by the Soviets in the 80s. But it had a completely different iconography than the desktop metaphor with folders and files and trashcans and drives, and it was almost completely impossible to guess what each icon meant.

I don't remember many of them, but one of the weirder was an icon of a slingshot as the "kill process" icon. Why? Because the system represented processes as birds on a wire, so you'd use the slingshot to take them down, obviously. I also remember a tractor, I think you used it to restart the system or something.

And armed with that you start looking at the iconography of the systems you're used to. A clipboard means I take some text from a buffer and write it out? Really? A pair of scissors means I copy text into a buffer? A sheet of paper is a file? Why? Saving is an icon of a floppy disk, a thing that hasn't been around in 20 years?? I had a friend trying to explain to his kids what it was, and failed.

> A clipboard means I take some text from a buffer and write it out? Really? A pair of scissors means I copy text into a buffer? A sheet of paper is a file? Why?

I don't think either of these are as bad as you make them out to be. No one thinks in terms of buffers. With a scissor you can cut away stuff (and put it somewhere else) so it makes sense. A sheet of paper is where you write or draw things, so it makes sense.

Clipboard, well they are portable and you can make notes on them and then write them down somewhere else. Kinda-ish makes sense.

Floppy maybe doesn't make sense unless you know what it is.

> Floppy maybe doesn't make sense unless you know what it is.

Even if you know what a floppy is it's not that obvious without a bit of context. People today seem to analogise floppies to USB keys, devices to move data. The idea that you would save a file directly to portable storage, rather than just to the hard drive, is somewhat alien.

> The idea that you would save a file directly to portable storage, rather than just to the hard drive, is somewhat alien.

But it will live with as for a very long time as the save icon.

Fit those of us who didn't realise to start with: it's an ad in article's clothing.

Took too long to load, for me. So, I came back to HN. Good to know it's an ad, so I won't mind skipping it.

There always something moving and, in the end, it only manage to be an unreadable website at best.

I stopped skimming before it gave me a headache.

Nice article, nice styling, but a nail-scratch-on-schoolboard ending: a marketing pitch. The article shows icon styles through the years, with a hint of progression. And now we've finally arrived at the optimum, the iconset of iconsets: [insert product here]

long load time

cannot scroll by space / PageDown -> mouse click & grab... pretty bad for keyboard navigation BUT that means it's touch-oriented

nice icons / graphics, as a retro computing & minimalist wallpapers fan, worth the loading time

Could be an nice timeline if only the content parts that are actually interesting (the text and the icons) didn't jump & slide around driving me insane.

Painful on the eyes.

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