OS-tan
OS-Tan refers to fan made characters originating on early 2000s Japanese internet image boards, where users anthropomorphized Windows operating systems as cute anime girls, each embodying the personality, quirks, and visual style of the OS they represented. This viral phenomenon evolved from niche message board jokes into a significant fandom that eventually caught the attention of Microsoft and became part of official marketing campaigns in Japan. The concept of the OS-tan is reported to have begun as a personification of the common perception of Windows Me as unstable and prone to frequent crashes. Discussions on Futaba Channel likened this to the stereotype of a fickle, troublesome girl and as this personification expanded Me-tan was created and followed by the other characters. One of the early works to predominantly feature the OS-tan was an interactive Flash animation showing a possible intro to an imaginary anime show known as Trouble Windows. A fansub of this was eventually created and is partly responsible for the spread of the OS-tan to English language imageboards.
In
the beginning, Win-chan was created for TECH Win, a PC magazine published
by Enterbrain. Win-chan's earliest appearance in media might be from a
promotional CD, which dated back as early as October 1998. Though rather than
being based on a specific OS, she kind of just represented Windows as a whole.
Her design reflected the color palette of the Windows logo with dark blue hair
and a rainbow, Windows colored skirt.
The first canonical OS-tan is usually agreed upon to be
ME-tan created back in 2003. ME-tan is portrayed as a clumsy, unhinged girl who
tries to remain upbeat, but is always messing things up and running into
trouble. Unlike the Windows ME operating system, which users found infuriating,
ME-tan was portrayed more as a bumbling victim of her own code than a malicious
force. ME-tan's appearance rarely varies and is instantly recognizable. She has
green hair in long braided pigtails and wears a maid outfit with an exclamation
mark badge on the front modeled after the Windows error icon. She frequently
carries a scallion as a weapon (sometimes a crowbar instead) to defend herself
from malware attacks, this being a pun on a Japanese anti-virus software called
NeGIs (Negi is Japanese for Scallion).
⊹˚.♡Notable OS-tans♡｡༝
| ME-tan |
She is a hard worker and always wants to help her master (Toshiaki), and within the family, but predictably fails at everything she tries to do, often literally crashing and irritating her sisters. When she is not frozen or out of control, she tends to do things showing a lack of common sense or knowledge. But even after failure after failure, she still remains cheerful, friendly and optimistic. In spite of, or perhaps due to, her pitiful plight, the clumsy ME-tan is one of the most beloved OS girls. |
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| 95-tan | One of the more popular OS-tans, 95-tan is depicted as a traditional lady from the early modern era of Japan, usually shown as an older sister type. This is much due to her status as an older version of modern Windows. She is a gentle-looking brown haired woman in a kimono, with a hair ribbon showing the four Windows colors. The pattern of her kimono is based on the file hana256.bmp, which was used as a desktop wallpaper pattern in the Japanese version of Windows. | ||
| 98-Tan & 98 SE | Two early designs that continue to be used alongside the 98 an 98SE-tans are a pair of stick-limbed snack-boxes with a face and version number drawn in crayon, based on the Vulcan 300 toy that appeared in the anime series Konjiki no Gash Bell!!/Zatch Bell!.Both girls now make regular use of these as mechanical suits. The mech-box used by 98 is blue in colour, and likewise the 98SE mech-box has a green theme. The mechs are sometimes shown as guardians or friends to the 98-tans, otherwise the two girls can be seated inside them as pilots. | ||
|
A few variants exist, but the most common is 2k-tan, the personification for Windows 2000 Professional. She is typically drawn as an intelligent, professional, reserved looking woman with short blue hair, glasses, and hairclips that resemble cat ears flanking a small white bonnet or ruffle, similar to maid's hairclip that shows the windows logo. The cat ear-shaped hairclips are a pun: "2K" in Japanese is "Ni-Ke", the meowing sound in Japanese is "nya", so she is also known as "Nya-ke". | ||
| XP-tan | XP-tan is a dark-haired girl with ribbons in her hair and an XP hair ornament worn on the left side (infrequently, she is depicted with ornaments on both sides). As Windows XP was originally criticized for bloating a system and being very pretty without being equally as useful, XP-tan wears tight clothing and has large breasts (XP used a lot of memory-it became a trend to associate breast size with memory usage). An early alternate outfit was especially skimpy, wearing a blue miniskirt, high-heeled shoes, and a midriff-bearing tube top with "XP" on the front. She usually dresses in a blue-and-white stylized schoolgirl outfit with ribbons and detached sleeves for decoration. | ||
| NT-tan | Inu-T has blue hair kept in a ponytail that seamlessly transitions to floppy dog ears, a dog's tail and a collar. She usually wears gloves and boots shaped like paws, and colored blue to match her ears and tail. Her usual wearing a long dress. (NT has the romaji representation of "enu ti—"(エヌティ) this sounds a lot like "inu ti"(いぬてぃ), and "inu"(犬) is the Japanese word for dog.) Dog reflecting underlying DOS dependence. | ||
| Windows CE | Being an OS designed for small devices, the personification of Windows CE (CE for short) is portrayed as diminutive and fairy-like; complete with gossamer wings and wielding a USB cable wand. Because a modified version of Windows CE was the operating system of the Sega Dreamcast console, there are several illustrations of CE standing upon or around the Dreamcast's swirl logo. | ||
| MS-DOS | MS-DOS is most commonly represented as a shy schoolgirl, with black or dark grey hair in pigtails decorated with "DOS"-shaped hair ties; her hair ties are usually blue, but are sometimes depicted in the colors of the MS DOS prompt logo as shown in Windows. She wears round glasses, a white button-down blouse with a light blue skirt and suspenders. She carries around a keyboard, and is usually peeking around corners to represent always being in the background. | ||
| Windows SE | 2003 Server is often portrayed as being half-girl, half-fish, with an ethernet hub as a bonnet on her head. Other versions show her as a girl with a short white skirt and a vest-style top with a long tail in the back (usually with a bow) and Windows four-square logo pins in the bow at her neck and on the tail (as shown in the pic in the infobox). In some forms, she has a belt made from ethernet cable wrapped around her waist. Saba is a pun: in Japanese, the word for server is pronounced "saabaa", while "saba" is the word for mackerel. The more common design is the half-girl half-fish version. | ||
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