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.
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
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 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.
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.)
You decide!
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.
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
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.
Project Management is always disregarded as waste in hacker circles, but figuring out how to move projects forward is a worthwhile role in projects.
""" 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.
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 had to zoom in to verify that it's not the same.
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.
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”.
Windows 95 can be convinced to run in monochrome: http://toastytech.com/guis/miscw95bw.png (from http://toastytech.com/guis/misc2.html)
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")
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.
Love reading this kind of history straight from the creator :)
And I love your use of italics, Simon!
