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Icon Game
Reply to this post saying 'icon', and I will tell you my favorite icon of yours. Then post this to your own journal using your own favorite icon if you're one of those inhuman things that are actually capable of choosing betweenYOUR PRECIOUS BABIES!userpics.
I occasionally rotate my default icon, going between the ones I think are both "general, not expressing a specific reaction/emotion" and "especially pretty." Whatever I have as current default is usually the one I like most right now.
Setting this entry to the computing one. Decades ago, when I was really little, my family had a computer that would play this pattern of shifting squares -- it must have been a screensaver of some kind, I can't imagine what else it would be -- but I've never been able to find it in collections of retro/classic screensavers. And "abstract color-changing squares" isn't something you can narrow down on google. If not for somebody else making this icon with the exact right colors/combinations/pacing, I wouldn't be sure if it was something I really saw, or just something I imagined.
There's a special kind of nostalgia to it. Like a screenshot from a cartoon that blew your mind when you were eight, and then you never managed to watch it again, so there's a magic to the memory that never got tainted or tarnished by "oh no, it didn't hold up."
...so, uh, does anyone reading this know what this pattern was called? What OS was it shipped with? Who came up with it? Or at least, what niche Reddit community do I need to ask to solve this mystery?
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I think the hand-drawn TARDIS actually is my favorite, but that cute Marcille is so charming.
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Well, I feel confident it wasn’t any of the Windows distros of that decade; our old man was a programmer so we grew up with Windows comps from DOS through XP and I feel confident that wasn’t a screensaver for any of them. (We were kids. We liked seeing all the screensavers.) Unless it was Windows 2000 or whatever they called it, that one we DIDN’T have. But DOS, 95, 98, and XP, had ‘em all, wasn’t there.
Could it have been a Mac thing? It LOOKS like a Mac thing (says the folks who never used Macs). Alternately, could it have been just some little thing someone made for fun?
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My dad was also a programmer, and I have even-vaguer memories of a computer where the interface was just text. Which means this could've been from another unusually-old machine that was still hanging around...but yeah, it also had to be high-tech and modern enough to produce this color set...and I don't think we had Macs either.
"Little thing that someone made for fun" is an option -- although this was before the internet became a steady source of Little Things Made For Fun, so I have no idea where we would have gotten it!
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Update, the family group chat is thinking it wasn't a computer, but a separate "boxy kind of gadget with a screen on the side" that just did the colors. (A toy? A decorative object? A novelty lamp??)
I'll make another post if we dig it up!
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(What's driving me bonkers is I remember something similar, but it was a much more fluid color transition - as fluid as 3.1 could get, anyway - and you could specify what color palette it used. I want to say the palette I preferred was called Arctic or something similar, with a lot of pale pinks and blues and white.)
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Judging by the previews, no -- those images show black borders between the color squares, and they fade to black in between each color. The thing I'm remembering was (like the icon) borderless, and the squares went directly from one color to the next.
I don't remember different palettes, but it's possible they existed and I just didn't know where the setting was!