> 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.
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.
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.
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.
Gotta say something is lost moving from Bitmap to svg, there’s a certain charm to the “graininess” of bitmap
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 :)
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”.
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.
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
> 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)
PuTTY is a supurb tool. Thank you so much for your efforts over the years.
I remember this from the 90s.
And I love your use of italics, Simon!
> 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.