Ah, PuTTY. Good old reliable PuTTY. This little tool is one of those cornerstone applications in the toolbox of most of us, without any fuss, without any upsells or anti-user nonsense – it just does its job, and it has been doing its job for 30 years. Have you ever wondered, though, where PuTTY’s icons come from, how they were made, and how they evolved over time?
PuTTY’s icon designs date from the late 1990s and early 2000s. They’ve never had a major stylistic redesign, but over the years, the icons have had to be re-rendered under various constraints, which made for a technical challenge as well.
↫ Simon Tatham
The icons have basically not changed since the late ’90s, and I think that’s incredibly fitting for the kind of tool PuTTY is. It turns out people actually offer to redesign all the icons in a modern style, but that’s not going to happen.
People sometimes object to the entire 1990s styling, and volunteer to design us a complete set of replacements in a different style. We’ve never liked any of them enough to adopt them. I think that’s probably because the 1990s styling is part of what makes PuTTY what it is – “reassuringly old-fashioned”. I don’t know if there’s any major redesign that we’d really be on board with.
↫ Simon Tatham
Amen.
I second that.
Translation: It was recommended that icons use the EGA color palette that could be guaranteed to be present under Windows 3.x’s default 16-color 640×480 VGA driver… probably for the same Win32s reason that the author hypothesizes for the recommended inclusion of a black-and-white icon.
Possibly because white-on-blue was a common default color scheme for things like MS-DOS Edit, QBasic/QuickBASIC, Microsoft C/C++, and that’s likely why it got used for things like the Windows 3.x “Windows Setup” icon and the the majority of depictions of monitors in Windows 9x icons. (eg. Display control panel, System control panel, Computer and Monitors icons in Device Manager, the icon for application-layer protocol clients in the network control panel, one of the two computers for the network icon, etc.)
Story of B/W icons is a bit funny. Not just Windows 3.1, but even Windows 95 (maybe even Windows 98) can be installed on a system with Pentium and CGA (so 640x200x2 colors) if you would install Windows 3.x with a CGA driver ( http://old-dos.ru/index.php?page=files&mode=files&do=show&id=2318 ) and then upgrade. But if you would actually try to do that then you’ll find out that insane amount of Windows 3.x apps don’t include appropriate icons and don’t work adequately in B/W mode!