Posted on 11/15/2010 9:39:26 AM PST by Blue Highway
IBTZ
Are you having a day off...Or something?
I see innovative large icons for Go, Caution, Stop and BSOD, then the Window breaking into itty bitty pieces as it’s thrown outside in frustration.
I will admit that is pretty funny. And I do wonder if the BSOD represented by the blue pane was an inside joke from someone @ Microsoft.
I had an Atari 400... the daisy chain add ons... even had a modem
Funniest things I’ve ever seen/heard (on a Mac) was a warning that started with “Yikes!” and another time when I punched my Quadra, it made a car crashing sound and died.
They (Atari 400) were OK with 64K upgraded RAM. Never liked the membrane keyboard though.
As to the origin of the icon, it was a modernization of the original icon developed by Susan Kane with the Mac... back in 1984... to indicate a friendly computer with a personality.
Jonny Ives updated it with the release of the iMac. The rectangle represents the screen of the original Mac and it retains the smiling face of the personality of the Mac computer.
Not intended to start anything other than finding out the origin of the icon, which you and a few others have mentioned. Mission accomplished. Not really pointless, fun fun factoid type of vanity post. What’s wrong with that?
What prompted me to post this was I was checking out a tracking number on UPS.com and they have the Mac smiling icon, so it made me curious, and I figured if anyone would know the story behind that smiling art deco icon it would be Sword or anti-republicrat
OK...
"All my people are dark on the right side..."
Sadly, real life is rarely so exciting. The inital purpose of the bite was to give some scale so it wouldn’t be confused with a cherry.
My first experience with Microsoft was back with my Atari 800 with a version of Microsoft Basic in the early 1980s.
IIRC, for me it was BASIC for the TRS-80 Model III followed by the TRS-80 Model 100's firmware (including its BASIC), which was the last piece of software from Microsoft substantially written by Bill Gates himself. The latter was a quite impressive system, still in use today by many for real field work.
The clear logo was adopted in 2000, quite possibly because the rainbow one was seen as too ‘70s. It likely also symbolized the fact that they’ve shifted their focus to being more of a multimedia than a computer company (like changing their name from Apple Computer to Apple Inc.)
When the Amiga had an OS failure, it shifted the screen down, and displayed a black box with a red border, and in bright red letters: “Guru Meditation Error: xxxxx”.
This was an inside joke - Amiga Corp., in trying to raise funds for the development of the Amiga computer, designed and manufactured arcade game joysticks. One of their designs was a platform on which you stood, and shifted your weight to control the game. This was designed for skiing games, etc., but their own in-house game was called “Guru Meditation”, in which you sat on the platform and the less you moved, the higher your score.
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