Iconography of the PuTTY tools
50 comments
·March 12, 2025Sharlin
munificent
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.
ahonhn
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 :-)
gerdesj
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
t0mas88
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.
arp242
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.
cjbgkagh
Organization and complaining about disorganization stem from the same source, an intolerance to disorder.
gerdesj
"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.
Twirrim
I think, in part, because we don't have the same level of experience with how things are elsewhere.
emmelaich
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.
msla
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.
metalliqaz
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
autoexec
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
DOS-based editors used a blue background often: WordPerfect, QuickC…
camtarn
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.
RadiozRadioz
> 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
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.
rzzzt
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.
hinkley
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.
TZubiri
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.
ghxst
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 :').
metalliqaz
AKA "bike-shedding"
somat
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. """
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.
hinkley
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.
rzzzt
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.
acheron
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.
susam
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
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
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.
bhaak
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.
HenryBemis
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!
mjg59
> 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.
Lammy
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 :)
rzzzt
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
cluckindan
It’s from the ”Spy vs. Spy” comic strip.
reactordev
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”.
smallnix
Thanks for the blog post, I like these personal pieces of software history
Kwpolska
> 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)
ekaryotic
monochrome displays were common in low end laptops, but they were so expensive there weren't many around.
samstave
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
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.
Lammy
There was a little magic to make that happen too https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distribution_Media_Format
samstave
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.
adt
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.