This site made me realize the windows 1.x and windows 2.x (the ones from the early 80s!) logos look surprisingly modern!
Flat single-colored simple shape as is the trend today, with a light blue color that doesn't even exist in the standard EGA color palette.
As opposed to the much more colorful and busy icons that came after.
But then of course Windows 10 and Windows 11 are flat-single-colored simple shapes again since they are _actually_ released during today's logo design trends.
I thought those were just placeholder images, but you are right those were the actual logos of Windows at the time. Beautiful serif typography to match too:
Monochrome logos were expensive in past since colour printing (especially quality colour printing) was expensive. Apple was notorious for their colour logo, supposedly because they wanted to emphasize that they were offering colour personal computers. Ironically, they would introduce the black and white Macintosh a few years later.
At least with respect to user interfaces, many of the design elements were meant to emphasize the improved graphics capabilities. For example: the so-called "3-D" elements graphical elements of the mid-1990's, which were little more than shading to add the perception of depth, highlighted improved colour depth. I would imagine that something similar was at play when it came to product logos. So it's probably more of a case of more complex logos for more complex video.
Highlighting the improved graphics capabilities is meaningless these days, so there is little point in constraining themselves to colour logos, which gave an opportunity for simpler logos to return.
> But then of course Windows 10 and Windows 11 are flat-single-colored simple shapes again since they are _actually_ released during today's logo design trends
Which were design trends when Windows 1.0 was released. Back then, the resources were limited, now they are infinite.
The Windows modding scene was probably most active in the mid 2000s when XP's theming feature made it easy to create custom "skins" for all the UI elements. It's worth noting that most if not all of these custom "distros" were likely made by people who had no formal education in CS, and did it mainly as a way to play around and explore and/or impress their friends; I remember visiting the forums where this stuff happened back then, and some of the creators (self-reportedly) were very young --- early teens. The majority were likely male, but there was definitely some female presence too. I suspect a lot of them also didn't go into CS or other computer-related fields when they grew older, but they definitely embodied the classic "hacker spirit".
Any time I need a Windows install, I go for one of the custom builds. Not from crustywindo.ws, but there's a lot of Windows modding forums out there with varying "distros".
(It bears noting if you need to trust your OS, you shouldn't be using Windows at all)
They won't sell it to peasants like me. They refuse to even give a quote. Businesses only, and even then you must be a big business. Small/Medium need not apply.
The company I work for uses a really hacky way to "break" windows updates instead. Then "authorises" specific packages. I thought it was a group policy, but whatever this is a giant mess.
Sure, sure, let me go pop down to the county office and create a whole ass LLC and spend several hundred dollars so I can save an hour or three every year troubleshooting my windows install.
Brilliant. it's like saying to someone that has to get somewhere, "A journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step" while I'm over here passing you both in a bus.
If I remember correctly, the majority of that leak was tens of GB of weird Bill Gates conspiracy videos, and the actual source was a fraction of the size (few GB?)
Site/project creator here. It's nice to see my creation garner interest.
In all honesty, the project mostly serves as documentation and archival of Windows/Linux bootlegs (that is to say, relative popularity is kind of a side thing for me, though it's still nice. Having a reverse ego and limiting the project seems like a very bad move to make for an archival project IMO), as feeble file sharing websites have taken many links to them completely down.
As of the 2 years the project's been around, there's already at least a dozen bootlegs inside of the archive which, if we didn't have them, would not be on the clearnet (I'm sure there's probably at least one person hoarding at least a few which aren't public anymore, but I'm not counting that).
I just realized - the logos of Windows 3.x through 7 look more like flags than they look like windows. I wonder what the reasoning was behind that? I'm sure it has been documented/analyzed somewhere.
Mildly interesting: no Windows bootlegs from Oceania. I have a hard time believing that the enterprising people of Australia haven't created something, at least out of national pride...
Funnily, the one you don't list is Windows 2000, and in my memory that actually was reasonably hacker-liked. It didn't have the problems of the contemporaries - wasn't too fat (about the same as NT 4, but hardware had advanced) or too crashy or too much IE (or MSN.) I used 2000 as my daily driver for several years, even for gaming, up until around 2007 when compatibility with newer software and hardware dwindled.
2000 was great, I used it too. I admit to leaving it out because I couldn’t instantly think of a contemporary criticism!
It was a time when the Mac wasn’t even an option (OS 9 sucked, X was a barely working beta) and Linux was frustratingly unfinished. Windows 2000 really was a great OS for the hardware of the time.
I actually skipped winXP entirely because my main computer was an old thinkpad with win2000, xp would have just slowed it down and filled up more of the screen with UI candy. When I eventually got a new laptop it had vista which was fine for me (this was several months after its release, so the teething issues were basically fixed)
.svg){kind=link}
Flat single-colored simple shape as is the trend today, with a light blue color that doesn't even exist in the standard EGA color palette.
As opposed to the much more colorful and busy icons that came after.
But then of course Windows 10 and Windows 11 are flat-single-colored simple shapes again since they are _actually_ released during today's logo design trends.