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Iconography of the PuTTY tools

[Simon Tatham, 2025-03-12] In March 2025 I received an email asking about PuTTY’s “logo” – the icon used by the Windows executable. The sender wanted to know where it had come from, and how it had evolved over time.

The two computers are drawn in a style that was common in the ’90s: a system box sitting under a CRT monitor, with a floppy disk drive visible at the right-hand end. I didn’t believe I was being very original: I had the vague idea that several icons of this kind already existed (although I’ve never been able to find any specific example of what I was thinking of), so in my head, it fit with the general iconography of the day, and seemed as if it would be immediately understandable. So instead I took the secret agent’s hat – the only part which I had drawn to my satisfaction – and simply sat it on top of a larger version of the computer from the original PuTTY icon, at a rakish angle.

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