Post Contenthttps://www.youtube.com/shorts/xPmfsXjQbwc
[[{“value”:”Computers used to have character. And I mean that literally — they used to have little anime girls as official characters.
This week I reported on the reveal of Googlebooks, the post-Chromebook fusion of Android and ChromeOS. It’s painted top to bottom with Google’s Gemini AI, it’s clean, it’s basic and it’s boring. It made me long for the days when operating systems were so distinct that people imagined them as mascots. Specifically, a group of characters called OS Tans.
This is a trend that started waaay back in the year 2000, with the infamous Windows Millennium Edition, or Windows ME. Users on the Japanese image board 2Chan, the precursor to 4chan, imagined Windows ME as a clueless and accident-prone anime girl they called Me-Tan. It anthropomorphized the buggy and unstable OS into a cute cartoon. This trend proved so popular on the 2000s internet that it spread all over geeky communities, and soon there were OS-Tan anime girls representing pretty much every major operating system. Fan art and animations imagined them as living in a shared slice of life universe that was often cute, and as anime can be, frequently not safe for work.
(So don’t search too deep with safe mode turned off, or at least don’t say I didn’t warn you — I’m showing you the tamest stuff I can in this video.)
OS-Tans incorporated elements of the operating systems’ user interface, and sometimes even their technical capabilities, into the character design and behavior. Eventually they became such a frequent element of electronics culture in Japan that Microsoft made its own official OS-tan characters for Windows 7, 8, and 10, and even some other products like Silverlight and Azure.
The trend died down in the mid-2010s, and there’s no official OS-Tan for Windows 11. The only “character” Microsoft has made lately was this thing for Copilot. I think a lot that has to do with the sanitation of modern operating systems — you’re not a geek for being obsessed with software anymore. But it brings me back to my point: I can’t imagine anyone loving a Googlebook enough to draw it as an anime girl. Not even Google.
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