Thanks, I think, to the Ticking-Tocks, my now, holy shit, 13 yo kid somehow has become enamored with late 20th-century/early 2000s industrial design, specifically a movement he’s calling Frutiger Aero, but us old people just remember as the translucent and colorful candy-colors era. It was a fun era of design, I think, and I happened to have my wife’s old 1999 iBook, all bright orange and translucent, and Otto really wanted to try it out. I got it fired up again, and was hit with a wet slap of nostalgia, including some car-related nostalgia, which means I can use it for a Cold Start! Behold, an icon pack I made in the 1990s, featuring the cars driven by the members of my old sketch comedy group, The Van Gogh-Goghs.
These icons were made for Mac OS 9, which at the time had a maximum icon size of 32×32 pixels– modern icons can be up to 512×512, so these are pretty tiny. At the time, in like 1999 or so, icon sets were kind of A Thing, and there were sites that had nothing but sets of icons! Looks like some are still around, even, in some form!
More important, though, are the cars. Since I was the one making the icons, I thought it was important to include our cars, because I’ve always been a gearhead, as you know.
The set of cars is interesting as a sample of what people – at least six dorks who moved to LA to perform sketch comedy in shitty clubs – were driving. We had my ’73 Beetle, of course, a red XJ Cherokee that always seemed to have some cooling system issue, a mid-’90s Honda Accord, a Ford Escort GT that at the time seemed crappy but I have more respect for now, after prepping a non-GT Escort for a Lemons Race, and a pair of Saturn S-series cars, one first gen, one second-gen.
Want close-ups of the icons, so you can see every little pixel? Every little sub-pixel? Sure you do!
The Dr.Soda icon was there because we once, like in 1995 or something, did a comprehensive taste-test of as many Dr.Whatever sodas (ironically, there actually is a Dr.Whatever) and let me tell you, it was hell. The favorite color/steak is from an inside joke I barely remember, but I think still works.
Otto was pretty pleased by the experience, though. We couldn’t get it to go online, sadly, but it should be possible?
Also, if you want to waste more time on archaic VGG stuff, the website is sort of mothballed (it was picked by US News and World Report as one of the three best comedy sites on the web in 1999!) but you can poke through the rubble here.
Alternately, I can just show you Taillight Ruiners yet again:
I’m so old.
Those icons are boss.
Also it has become apparent Jason’s hair has been like this for at least 24 years.
Those Saturns both look also kind of like 300zx’s. (A little bit in real life, too)
Something I’ve done to get a quick and easy wifi connection to something that for whatever reason a) didn’t have internet due to lack of local infrastructure/a working wifi card and b) didn’t have a functioning/accessible USB port is plug a usb to ethernet dongle thingy to my phone and forward my phone’s WiFi connection through it.
Another random thought is that perhaps the Mac doesn’t speak modern DHCP and maybe the DNS servers aren’t configured correctly?
I breathe a sigh of relief knowing you didn’t actually destroy a Lancia Beta Coupe taillight.
That Accord genuinely looks like what Honda would have come up with themselves, if tasked with making such an icon
Oh man, this brings back fun memories of editing resource forks with ResEdit on MacOS 8/9. I did it for full customization of the OS look, not just the icons. I had custom startup screens, a ton of “fun” window designs/themes, the whole megillah. Classic MacOS was such a great OS. As a kid, I kinda resented the lack of games for system 6/7, but as a young adult with an iMac G3, I just loved everythig about OS 8/9 (8 was plagued with bugs, but the 8.5 fix made it fine, and 9 was just great). It was maybe a little more challenging to be a Mac user in some aspects back then – it’s not like I could just borrow a cd full of cracked software from a friend like everyone else was doing with windows software, but that was also part of what made the OS feel special. I still remember slowly discovering a whole world of pirated software in the early days of broadband using tools like FTP client Carracho, and finally feeling “equal” to my piracy-dowloading PC peers. Also, some amazing memories of early Mac gaming with the Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater series, MDK and Driver – Apple was slowly opening up to gaming under Classic environment right before OSX, and these machines proved just as powerful for native gaming as many PCs even if specs seemed lower on paper.
When you did Otto was using the iBook, I worried it was as a toilet seat.