Iconography of the PuTTY tools | Hacker News Reader

Iconography of the PuTTY tools

chiark.greenend.org.uk

400 pointsTomte105 comments

> 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.

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

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.

I'd accuse windows of knowingly setting expectations by choosing a blue screen as the default, but they were using it before the BSOD was even a thing

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

Do you remember Microsoft Word’s “Jerry Pournelle mode”? He convinced them to ship a feature that forced Word to render white text on a blue background, just like his favourite word processor, so that he would switch. I think the last version with this feature was Word 2003.

I used to use that occasionally!

It was Pournelle that inspired it? Really?

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

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.

No, but it is the shape of a drop that is about to drip. Which is a lot easier for people to see in detail than a falling raindrop.

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.

I think, in part, because we don't have the same level of experience with how things are elsewhere.

The "Elderly People" road signs win for me: https://c8.alamy.com/comp/2GYPJR6/an-elderly-people-roadside...

The first time I saw one of these I stopped to take a picture. It just seems the most ridiculous thing to warn people about, as if somehow "elderly people" can't cross the road.

I'd saw we need them in the US, but no one walks here - and by the way people ignore the warning signs for children, I assume it'd have no effect anyways.

They can and they will and when you run them over because you where going at the speed limit minding your own WhatsApp nobody will come to your rescue blaming the victim for jaywalking.

You might consider them redundant because elderly people can also cross the road where there aren't any signs, but then few warning signs aren't.

> It just seems the most ridiculous thing to warn people about, as if somehow "elderly people" can't cross the road

I don't understand this mindset. Do people not walk where you live, or do you not have elderly care homes? I've been to _multiple_ countries and nearly all of them with some uniform signage standard warn motorists about elderly and children crossing.

I think the point is that elderly people are fairly sentient so you don't have to worry about them doing dumb things like darting out in front of a semi truck like you do with kids so there's no reason to warn drivers about a high density of them since they behave like normal pedestrians if perhaps a bit slower.

I think it's more to warn a motorist to be mindful of slow moving people. And older people do occasionally fall over too.

Naples FL needs signs like these. Only it’s to warn motorists of elderly people attempting to pilot Lamborghinis and other ridiculously powerful sports cars. It’s surreal to see valet have to help an 80 year old out of a aventador and the step up the curb to the door of a restaurant.

"while being so absurdly well-organized."

I note a z in organized ...

I do get where you are coming from: My mum used to joke about a fictional sign that said "Please do not throw stones at this sign". Some of our signage is absolutely laughable.

We do have road signs that proclaim: "New signage" or "New road system" etc. The locals know what has changed already and non locals are encountering it for the first time anyway, so why bother.

Across the entirety of the UK, our road signage is pretty rock solid. There may be a few degenerate cases but all sharp corners have chevron warning signs and they do save lives.

> We do have road signs that proclaim: "New signage" or "New road system" etc. The locals know what has changed already and non locals are encountering it for the first time anyway, so why bother.

I'm not sure it's as absurd as it sounds. Do you look at the signage you pass every day? I suspect I don't.

When they put in a new stop sign near where I live (in the US), things were less safe for a long time because people consistently drove through it without slowing. Since this was not a consistent problem with any other stop sign nearby, I believe it was not willful disobedience but people so used to there being no stop sign there that they literally didn't see it.

(Even with literal neon pennants on it, people kept driving through it anyway, but you'd at least sometimes see people skid to a stop partway through the intersection, presumably as their brains caught up. And eventually it penetrated locals' consciousnesses, and now they stop.)

Fair point.

"Do you look at the signage you pass every day?" - I do and so does my sodding car and it still annoys me when it gets the speed limits wrong!

I accept I'm not everyone and noting and warning about change is a good idea. We do have a lot of signs and I'm pretty sure I've seen signs warning about upcoming signage (not really 8)

I'm happy to report that I've driven in several US states (mostly FL, including around and in Miami and Orlando) and found it pretty straight forward. "Right on red" is pure genius and "four way pass in turn" is not, especially when multiple lanes are involved!

I'm fairly certain I can find a sign that says, not verbatim, "no shooting at signs" riddled with bullet holes. There was one near the experimental USDA forest, but I bet I could crowd source another one.

Most signs do not have bullet holes in them. Like, 98/100 signs are holes-frei

Well it's certainly true that "no shooting" signs typically have bullet holes in them.

> non locals are encountering it for the first time anyway

Not entirely accurate? Non-locals may visit the area often enough that they're familiar with the area but will not necessarily be familiar with local changes.

(eg parents visiting from another part of the country every few months)

> We do have road signs that proclaim: "New signage" or "New road system" etc. The locals know what has changed already ...

Not really. New changes like adding stop signs or converting a one way stop to all way must be conveyed to locals who's muscle memory will send them sailing through.

Happened to me recently, city added an all way stop to a 4-way free for all intersection and converted two intersections from one way to all way stop. I sailed right through the new all way stop the first day - no cop but I caught it as I went through. Missed the big yellow NEW STOP AHEAD too. Almost ran it again the next few times. Now at least 6 moths later I still see that sign and have to think "oh yeah, thats there."

> I note a z in organized ...

I think high school English in my country is officially British English, but practically we all learn from reading American media.

Organization and complaining about disorganization stem from the same source, an intolerance to disorder.

> No country complains about itself more while being so absurdly well-organized.

I’ve noticed Australians seem to have a similar issue: they decry the Nanny State at home, but all the ones I’ve met abroad complain about the current location being insufficiently nannified. Often both complaints in the same conversation.

Finally: Italians. I thought a trip from Milan to Rome was going to be like a trip through Somalia the way the Italians I know describe their country. In fact, everything seemed to work exceptionally smoothly, although whenever I bring this up I’m told that I simply didn’t venture south enough.

That’s not my experience of Australians at all! The Australians I’ve met (through working for an Australian company) all seem to love their nanny state, and genuinely don’t understand how anyone could see anything undesirable in it.

Somehow the same country that venerates Ned Kelly

You only have to watch one episode of Aussie Dash Cams to see how we Australians feel about authority.

Freedom for me, but cheering when someone else gets caught by the police when they are breaking the law. It’s an odd dichotomy. I don’t hate it but we do seem to lack self awareness with a slightly English style.

Because you're meeting the ones so content they don't leave.

All the things people are saying here about Australians are the same complaints Americans in the west have about Californians.

It might be useful here to give a current example or two of Aussie nanny statism, just for context

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-12-30/malcolm-turnbull-fine...

LOL, that struck home. While I'm living in Germany now, I lived in Napoli from 2004 to 2009 and I have to agree with our Italian friends: Italy south of Rome is a markedly different country and experience.

*Tatham

My finger slipped across most of the keyboard, or I fucked up.

You decide!

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.

In particular, WinAmp at the time used a yellow lightning bolt in its icon, which was on damn near every Windows machine in the 90s.

WinAmp's yellow lightning icon is still sitting happily in my Windows icon tray right this very moment. Pageant is in there too with its cute little spy-hat :-)

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.)

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.

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.

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

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

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.

> 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.

Putty and Winamp are two softwares that I've used for 20+ years on Windows and that still feel the same. They don't get old or outdated.

> They don't get old or outdated.

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

> 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!

Any reason for that?

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 - underlined or outlined, have their title text

Buttons https://m3.material.io/components/all-buttons - fully colored or outlined, may have a shadow, more rounded, differently-styled

>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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

AKA "bike-shedding"

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.

You should work on a new and improved filesystem implementation and name the project 'New Folder'.

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.

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.

Analysis paralysis.

It's not usually icons for me. It's some really repetitive part of the project that puts me off, and I figure out some way to code around it, but doing so is not rewarding enough, or I hit some dopamine threshold where I've 'solved' the problem enough that I'm satisfied with the mental exercise alone.

Bike shedding in Parkinson's description is paradoxically putting more thought on things that are easy to comprehend than things that are hard to grasp.

Yak shaving is having to do something seemingly unrelated to your project before you can make progress on more evidently related issues.

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 :').

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

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.

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.

And I think that B&W made sense as back then, there would have been a number of monochrome portable computers still in service.

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

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.

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

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

Additionally, here are examples from printed materials of that era confirming these colour names:

1) 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... - Page 289 refers to colour 7 as white and colour 15 as high-intensity white.

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.

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.

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!

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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

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.)

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

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 :)

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

I'm seeing Carmen Sandiego in it for some reason, but the modern version (from 2014) has a film noir detective in the same spot (the application icon is still the lady in the hat): https://youtu.be/h-_UNm_gycU?t=94

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

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.

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

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”.

> 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)

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")

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.

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.

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

Oh, I vaguely remember this from when floppy disks were still around (though not by the name DMF) - I remember them having a 1.44MB capacity but some smart people reformatted their floppy disks to get it up to 1.68MB.

Windows 95 came on 13 floppies. That version excluded most fancy features, you can't compress ~360 MB to ~22.

Windows 11 could also "fit on a set of floppies" - although thousands of floppies would be completely absurd, it is not impossible.

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

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

Monochrome laptops were a thing

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.

I remember this from the 90s.

And I love your use of italics, Simon!

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

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