Amusing OS Mascots

Current mood: Amused

Currently listening to: Some weird Japanese song

An amusing thing I’ve stumbled across recently is the concept of “OS-tan”, which is basically unofficial OS “mascot” characters.

A detailed explanation can be found in this entry from Wikipedia, the free on-line encyclopedia.

Of course, I’ll break it down for you (sticking just to MS Windows for simplicity’s sake):

Windows 95: A girl in a traditional japanese kimono who also carries samurai swords. Symbolic of the agressive marketing of Windows 95.

Windows 98: A shy girl who hides in her box. I don’t get this one either.

Windows ME: A cute but goofy green-haired girl who constantly trips, breaks things, and basically resembles the awful OS she’s named after. (You all remember how crappy Windows ME was, right?)

Windows 2000: An older girl with a professional look and glasses. Always represented as good, kind, and stable. Kind of like the OS (which, BTW, I’m still using at home).

Windows XP (pro and home): A pair of cute girls (green and blue, representative of the colors of the boxes for pro and home). Often drawn with…errr… large… …um… “system requirements”. A reference to the obnoxious amount of memory and processing power that these operating systems require.

All of the OS mascots tend to have the Windows colors (watch your boot screen if you forgot about the Windows flag, or just look at the “flying objects” screen saver) integrated into their outfit in some way. The XP girls have hair clips that look like “XP”; ME has the caution/exclamation point icon on her outfit (a reference to how often ME crashes).

Leave it to those wacky Japanese! Still, if you follow the links from the Wikipedia article, you might find some neat pictures. Crazy? Yes. Obscure? Yes. Geeky? Certainly. But … still … kinda neat!

-Keithius