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edenwaith

macrumors 6502a
Aug 7, 2001
689
90
Oscar

I had that Oscar the Grouch animation on one old computer I inherited. Kind of cute, but I imagine that a lot of files were accidentally trashed by young children who wanted to see Oscar sing.

Kinda makes me wish there was a "classic" theme to OSX. Anyone remember changing the sounds of functions like emptying the trash? In the early '90s, I had Oscar the Grouch singing "I LOOOOOVE trash". For another, can't remember if it was the error noise or new mail, I had Arnold Schwarzenegger saying "Your clothes, give them to me, now!". So much fun!
 

scott911

macrumors 6502a
Aug 24, 2009
758
456
awesome -- remember going to a friend's house - only mac owner I knew at that time...

seeing these icons brings back great memories!
 

bertman

macrumors member
May 28, 2008
62
0
Laurel, Maryland
Thanks for the Memories...

Seeing these made me : o )

----------

I miss Oscar the Grouch singing to me when I emptied my trash...

lol -- I remember hearing a story how a parent regretted installing Oscar:

Their child loved it sooooo much - how Oscar popped up when you emptied the trash...
 

moderately

macrumors 6502
Sep 7, 2010
323
20
The Mac IIsi was my first Mac. I wasted many an hour recording and editing sounds to assign them to actions. Those were the days ...

On my first Mac I decided to use a recording of myself saying "ooooh-kaaaay" as an alert because I would say that when something didn't work. I didn't realize that I would also say it before I tried something I was unsure of.
"ooooh-kaaaay"- me, attempting something
"ooooh-kaaaay"- computer alert
"ooooh-kaaaay"- me, realizing that attempt failed and that the alert was making me crazy.
 

parish

macrumors 65816
Apr 14, 2009
1,082
2
Wilts., UK
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Command_key#Origin_of_the_symbol

Thanks. Part of my reason for asking was, as the wiki mentions, the symbol is used for places of interest in Sweden and elsewhere (love the comment that some Swedish Mac users call it the ancient monument key :-D
 

jimoase

macrumors member
Apr 3, 2007
36
0
A thousand words in a 16x16 matrix

We had CP/M and its shade tree offspring DOS. No icons in desktop computers until the Mac.

A clever imagination opened the door to Macintosh.

Education at a glance.
 

SmileyBlast!

macrumors 6502a
Mar 1, 2011
654
43
Nice Work Susan Kare.
It's great that she pioneered computer graphic design and had the chance for so many people to see and enjoy her work.

Now with retina level screens icons have to be 1024x1024 works of art.
It's a much harder job today.
 

Mac Heretic

macrumors member
Feb 22, 2006
68
11
Nice Work Susan Kare.
Now with retina level screens icons have to be 1024x1024 works of art.
It's a much harder job today.

Those people with single bits were the pioneers of GUI. They lived in a digital desert and created the concepts for icons and symbols which we take nowadays for garanted.
 

roadbloc

macrumors G3
Aug 24, 2009
8,784
215
UK
You don't know if they'll be used on the next product. ie. You might be working at Apple as a graphics designer but you never know if your work will be used. Hell, they might throw out the entire Mac plan, especially being how fragile the company was back then.

That doesn't mean it cant be exciting work. Especially if you're passionate about what you're doing and what you're working for.
 

SmileyBlast!

macrumors 6502a
Mar 1, 2011
654
43
How so? The tools and constraints are different, and more pixels != more difficult.

Are you really saying that it would be hard to create a 32 x 32 pixel icon than a 1024 x 1024 one?

Our tools have improved, I'll grant you that but there is just more to quality control with a larger canvas.
 

Larry-K

macrumors 68000
Jun 28, 2011
1,888
2,340
Nice Work Susan Kare.
It's great that she pioneered computer graphic design and had the chance for so many people to see and enjoy her work.

Now with retina level screens icons have to be 1024x1024 works of art.
It's a much harder job today.
Quite the contrary, the constraints imposed by the old GUI were much more restrictive.

From a graphics standpoint, even at the time the Mac icons were relatively unsophisticated, but few people understood how to distill icons to their essentials, and it was a new frontier.
 

Al Downie

macrumors newbie
Apr 19, 2013
23
21
Cambridge UK

Oh! Blimey, there's a nostalgia trip! I had a boss once who was a really highly-strung, volatile, bad-tempered ogre. Whenever his Mac crashed (which it did frequently), he used to come STORMING out of his office screaming: "THE WHOLE FREAKIN' SYSTEM'S COLLAPSED!!". That was my cue to go into his office and reboot. Sometimes I'd zap the PRAM too if he was watching, because that's the kind of kung-fu that wins pay rises. Anyway - this was a frequent routine and everyone was familiar with the slamming doors and the hysterical outburst - always the same phrase. One day, when he was off on holiday, we snuck into his room and fired up his Mac, and used ResEdit to change every dialogue box we could find to say: "THE WHOLE FREAKIN' SYSTEM'S COLLAPSED!!!". The following Monday when he came back from holiday, as usual he shut himself in his office to catch up with all his jobs. Within half an hour, we heard the familiar sound of his chair crashing to the floor as he stomped to the door which flew open - he stormed out with a red face and steam coming from his ears and stood shaking with fury, and said... "FFFFFFFFFFRRRFFFFRFFFFFF!!!!" and then turned around and stormed back into his office again! Five minutes later he came out and asked politely, with a smile, if I could fix his computer for him. A lucky escape!
 

tirerim

macrumors regular
Aug 4, 2006
204
0
Are you really saying that it would be hard to create a 32 x 32 pixel icon than a 1024 x 1024 one?

Our tools have improved, I'll grant you that but there is just more to quality control with a larger canvas.

Designers today aren't working at the level of individual pixels, though. With those old, tiny, bitmapped icons, you can't render shapes, you have to get each pixel right by hand. They really just use different skills.
 

ozybrum

macrumors newbie
Apr 19, 2013
1
0
I loved doing that. Plus constantly screwing around with control panel settings, editing the system file and juggling extensions. Does anyone remember the name of that program for editing system files? The icon was a jack in the box popping out of a mac.

It was called ResEdit. I fixed several computers for people who had screwed around with it and destroyed their System file.

I remember using it to increase the size of a fixed window in a piece of communications software. I was able to see around 20 lines of a conversation while others could only see 10. It seemed a triumph at the time!

It was very useful with early Hypercard to move picture and sound resources between "stacks". I also used it to "rob" sounds from games and use them as my system sounds.
 

MacSince1990

macrumors 65816
Oct 6, 2009
1,347
0
Ahh, I used to love those Icons (although System 7 was better once we got color graphics); used to spend hours in ResEdit editing system icons haha
 

tirerim

macrumors regular
Aug 4, 2006
204
0
Art is not poverty, check out Feng Zhu, he is on a 7 figure salary as a concept artist. It is a specialised field just as brain surgeon is. Not many people can do it so you can name your price.

I am on a high pay cheque for my graphic talent. It is easy to decline people who don't want to pay much because they have to settle with lower quality work or pay for what they desire.

I am pretty sure that you and Feng Zhu are the exceptions, not the rule. I know a lot of programmers, and a lot of artists (note, general category, not just graphic designers), and the programmers in general make much more than the artists. Yes, the top people in many fields will make plenty of money -- I'd wager that top artists make more than top programmers, in fact -- but that doesn't matter much to the average person in them.
 

alexgowers

macrumors 65816
Jun 3, 2012
1,338
892
Really, susan kare is a talentless designer who did the bad icons before apple employed proper graphics designers. She only did the cheap stuff and the naff facebook gifts etc that are really very poor.

Nice that she did some iconic stuff but it's not that way because of its artistic quality but it's retro time frame and ubiquity.

Please, go find the current designers of the os icons (not the skeuromorphic ones) and i'd be interested to hear their stories.
 
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