OS-tan
A small Internet phenomenon on Futaba Channel, the OS-tan (OS for Operating System, and "-tan," which is a mistaken interpretation of the Japanese "-chan," a cute honorific for a person, usually children) or simply OS Girls are the personification of several OSes, most famously Windows, by various amateur Japanese artists. A pure fan creation, the appearance of each character is generally consistent across artists. OSes are almost always portrayed as women, the Windows girls usually as sisters, despite sometimes seeming the same age.
History
The concept 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. The personification became expanded, with the creation of Me-tan (dated to August 6 2003) followed by the other characters.
A large collection of these images can be found here. Some of the comics have been translated by readers on 4chan and idlechan. They have been archived at Trouble Windows Translations, along with the japanese counterparts. There are still many raw comics left and new translations or corrections of previous ones are always welcome.
A collection of avatar images based on the OS-tan characters has been created by members of the Megatokyo forums, which are available here.
There also exists a Macromedia Flash Animation showing a possible intro to a hypothetical, but highly unlikely, anime show, Troubled Windows (とらぶる．ういんどうず). A fansub of this has been created, and can be found here. The music is Sakuranbo Kiss (さくらんぼキッス ～爆発だも～ん～), by KOTOKO, which was originally the opening theme from an H-game called Colorful Kiss (カラフルキッス～１２コの胸キュン！～), released by GIGA. An ending theme called OS-Pittan also exists. The music is Futari no Xenopittan(ふたりのぜのぴったん), a remix version of Futari no Mojipittan, a song from the PS2 word puzzle game Mojipittan. The song was made for a game based on Mojipittan called Xenopittan, which features Xenosaga characters and vocabulary. It is found on the Xenosaga fan disc Xenosaga Freaks. It can be heard at the end of the medley found here. The song was sung by Shion Uzuki (CV: Maeda Ai), KOS-MOS (CV: Suzuki Mariko), M.O.M.O. (CV: Shishido Rumi). Also, as a satire, Bill Gates was mentioned in the credit of this hypothetical anime (after about 50 seconds).
There also exists a Photoshop-modified picture, mimicking news of a new animation release in a Japanese magazine. A Ghost in the Shell crossover exists and is floating around the Internet, although it should be noted that it contains heavily implied scenes of various cultural taboos.
Mac OS X, Linux, and Linspire girls have also shown up on the internet, although some non-OS male characters exist for programs and hardware. Norton Antivirus is usually portrayed as a creepy looking, possibly lecherous old doctor.
The OS girls
Windows
ME
The more cutesy personification of the much maligned and infamously unreliable Windows ME OS, ME-tan's appearance rarely varies and was the first OS-tan created, by the one now called 'ME-aki'. She is instantly recognizable; she has green hair in long pigtails and wears a maid outfit with a ! badge on the front in the spirit of the Windows yellow error icon. ME-tan is a hard worker and always wants to help her master (Toshiaki), but predictably fails at everything she tries to do, and 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, such as putting soda into a microwave oven or attempting to kill people by swinging a scallion (see below). In spite of, or perhaps due to, her pitiful plight, the clumsy ME-tan is one of the most beloved OS girls.
XP
XP is a sexy, dark-haired girl wearing the XP logo as a hair ribbon. As XP is sometimes criticized for bloating a system and being very pretty without being equally as useful, XP-tan wears very little and has large breasts. Also, as XP uses up large amount of memory, XP-tan eats a lot, usually holding a large empty bowl with the word "memory" on it, but still requests more. A rare variant that represents XP Home features a more reserved look, akin to 2K Pro-tan. She has XP shaped hairclips instead of a ribbon, and tends to wear her hair up in a short ponytail. An even rarer variant, for XP Media Center Edition, has short hair and small earrings in the style of XP Professional's hairclip.
2000
A few variants exist, but the most common is Win2K 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. Her outfit resembles a swimsuit suggesting the Windows logo colors, and she wears a long coat. This is thought to reflect the opinion that Windows 2000 is the most stable, dependable, and balanced system. She is characterized as the "dependable woman" among the OS-tans and one of the domain controllers. Because of the greater stability of Win2K compared with WinME, which was released near 2K, 2K-tan is often described as a guardian of ME-tan. The blue in the picture is close to the default Windows 2000 desktop colour.
95
95, being an older version of "modern" Windows, is usually represented as a traditional lady from the early modern era of Japan. 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 off the file "hana256.bmp," which was used as a desktop wallpaper pattern in the Japanese version of Windows. Moreover, the color of the big ribbon on her head imitates the logo of four colors of Windows. Her costume is a traditional kimono and a hakama of Japan, and she wears thick sandals (geta or zori?) on her feet. These are women's college student's typical clothes as seen in the earliest period during the course of the modernization in Japan (It applies to Taisho Era from the Meiji Era.), and the cultural background for the comparison of the modernization of Windows to modernization of Japan is seen there.
Her most common activities are drinking tea, serving meals or doing other housework. One recurring theme is her unfamiliarity with newer, post Win-95 technologies, such as USB devices and broadband internet connections. She is also occasionally depicted wielding a katana in an aggressive manner, symbolizing that it was her generation of operating systems that Microsoft finally achieved full dominance of the personal computer market. One comic strip shows her talking to other OS-tans about beating up the Mac girls; and 95 is commonly portrayed with an overwhelming hatred of the Macintosh OS Tans.
Because Mozilla Firefox is incompatible with Windows 95, several OS-tan four-panel comics have been made portraying other OS-tans encouraging 95-tan to "think in Russian!" and 95-tan's inability to internalize the Russian language enough to accomplish this.
Windows 95 OSR 2.5
The last patched version of 95, Windows 95 OSR 2.5, resembles the first but has shorter hair, and outfits are black and dark coloured versions of 95's. She also has a more extroverted personality. She also seems to regard 98-tan as a rival, and is sometimes seen wearing a black skirt, black gloves, and a white sleeveless shirt like 98, but with a red tie and black 95 style bow.
98 and 98SE
Many variants exist; however, the most common are a pair of young girls. The First Edition of 98 has a white and blue uniform, navy blue hair with a clip shaped like "98" and has a windows logo as part of a necktie. The 98 Second Edition normally has grey-blue hair and a green sailor school uniform with the letters SE on the front.
Both girls make regular use of 'mechanical suits', a stick-limbed snack-box with a drawn face, based on the 'Vulcan 300' toy that appeared in the anime series "Konjiki no Gash Bell!!". 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. The box sizes can vary, ranging from doll-like when carried by the girls to taller than an adult when they ride inside them. In the very early days before the designs of the primary OS-tans had settled, the mech-boxes were also used as 'placeholder' designs for the other OS-tans; there had been instances of Windows2000 and Windows3.11 'hiding' in their mechs before they were ready to be seen.
While both are fairly shy girls, 98SE is seen hiding in her mech-box a lot more often.
NT
This character is not so common. She usually has the purple hair and the pink dress seen here, but her age can range from child to adult. Sometimes she is also portrayed as the mother of 2K-tan. Another version, Windows NT Workstation, also exists. NT Workstation-tan has blue hair, dog ears, a dog's tail and a necklace. "NT" has the romaji representation of "enu ti"—this sounds a lot like "inu ti", and "inu" is the Japanese word for dog.
Another NT-tan, Windows NT SP6, was designed by the doujin group Deja vu, but it was considered a bootleg design by Futaba society and not an "official" OS-Tan.
(See "Dispute between Futaba society and Deja vu" below for detail)
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 even wielding a USB cable wand. She usually handles her workload by casting enchantments with the 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.
Longhorn
This character doesn't have many pictures and not much is known about her as she is based on Microsoft Operating System Windows Longhorn, which is still in development. One picture shows her as a girl with dark blue hair and two horns extending from the back of her head to the front; her clothing is all white except across the shoulders where it's black and there are the letters L and H on her chest. A design becoming more common is a young girl with long brown hair in pigtails wearing one or two clips featuring an orange and black logo resembling a stylized bull's head.
2003 Server (Saba)
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. 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 "saaba", while "saba" is the word for mackerel.
3.1
A rare character, the few appearences of Windows 3.1 have used a white 'mech-box' similar to that used by 98 and 98SE, piloted by a girl who appears to be DOS/V. Another version becoming more popular is a frail grey-haired young woman in a long frilly violet gown, with a "3.1" brooch on her collar. She is usually accompanied by either a black cat or a small black-haired catgirl in a nurse's outfit, both representing DOS.
MS-DOS
A rarer character, MS-DOS is a cute but very shy little girl carrying around a keyboard and usually peeking around corners. The implication is that, like MS-DOS itself on most pre-2000 versions of Windows, she is always lurking somewhere in the background, just out of sight.
DOS/V
DOS/V is a variant of MS-DOS designed with Japanese language support. She is about the same size as DOS but has long grey or grey-blue hair and a dark bodysuit. She is also a lot less shy.
Mac OS
Mac OS 9
Mac OS 9 is the most common Mac OS girl. She is blonde, and wears a ribbon shaped like a 9 and a "platinum white" bodysuit. She usually carries a large apple on her head, or a bomb from the standard Macintosh error dialog. Other common accessories are a white dress with the Mac face logo on the skirt with a slit up the front that follows the nose/profile line, and showing some of her hair like the "detached leaf" as used by the multi-coloured Apple Computer logo. Usually friendly and demure, OS 9 has been known to fly into insane rages when angered.
Mac OS X
The Mac OS X girl is often portrayed as cat-eared, following with the Apple "wild cat" naming tradition. (Every Mac OS X release has a codename like "Jaguar", "Panther" and so on.) Otherwise, she is shown as an older variation of the Mac OS 9 girl, wearing a platinum white coat and a wireless AirPort device fashioned as a hat. She is occasionally shown holding a publication of some sort, as Macs are often used for desktop publishing.
Linspire
A girl with blue and green hair who wears a white shirt. As the color of her hair is similar to that of a scallion, she is usually referred to as "Scallion girl". Formerly known as Lindows.
Linux
A girl with a penguin-like helmet and flippers, a reference to Linux's penguin mascot Tux. Her helmet usually has horns on it, likely a reference to the GNU project which is often associated with Linux. The "gear-teeth" on the helmet is a reference to KDE, a common desktop environment used with Linux. She is often seen with a spear that has flags attached representing the GRUB, LILO and GCC tools for Linux.
Other characters
Norton AntiVirus
Doctor Norton, an unspeakably lecherous old doctor, personifies the Symantec Norton AntiVirus software. While an ingenious physician, he is infamously known to request (and attempt) the total undressing of an OS-tan for a full physical inspection, even when they're completely healthy. The doctor's lust has no bounds, and his morality is void. His appearance as a Japanese ghost (the whisp of smoke style tail end instead of legs) is a reference to the Norton Ghost system recovery tool.
Trend Micro Virus Buster
A personification of another antivirus software. He is a young boy, who wears a white T-shirt with the words "Trend Micro" on it. It seems that he also likes to take a peep at OS-tans' bodies, a so-called "virus scan", just like Doctor Norton.
McAfee Antivirus
A personification of another antivirus software, but images of this character are rare. Unlike the two antivirus programs above, McAfee Antivirus is a blonde woman, wearing a long red dress. She is occasionally seen wearing a monocle, or period European wear, also in a red-yellow coloring scheme. It seems that both Doctor Norton and Trend Micro welcome her existence, due to her beauty.
Toshiaki
A personification of typical anonymous users that visit the image boards of Futaba (i.e. Nijiura). Sometimes portrayed as the OS-tans' "master"—representing computer users in general. He is as perverted as Norton, if not more so. There is a short series of comics where he tries to take advantage of the OS-tans by getting them drunk, but gets beaten up each time.
"Toshiaki" is the default name used when posting at some bulletin boards, but it does not mean "anonymous" in Japanese. It originates from Futaba Channel; a user calling himself "toshiaki" repeatedly posted messages, requesting others to upload a Doujinshi. Later, everyone on the board started using his name to post stupid things, and eventually this was so common that the site keeper changed the default "anonymous" name to "toshiaki".
To distinguish between different "Toshiaki", some of them are called "something-aki". For example, the original ME-tan designer is now called "ME-aki".
Outlook
Based on Microsoft Outlook, a blonde girl in a blue maid uniform, with a white apron and orange collar bow. Delivers mail to the OS-tans.
Alternate Male OS Characters
Referred to as the "OS-kuns", where "-kun" is the Japanese honorific commonly used informally between males, are counterpart characters of the OS-tans.
XP-kun is large man in his late teens to early 20s, with a very muscular build, wears shackles on his wrists and legs, tattered blue and white clothing not unlike XP-tan's, and several large scars forming the letters "XP" across his chest. His hair is black, and braided into a long ponytail. XP-kun has an aggressive temperment, and is known for not thinking things through.
ME-kun is a unremarkable boy of high-school age wearing a green uniform, a blazer and shorts, of a private academy. Like his female counterpart he has green hair, with the long 'antenna'; but unlike ME-tan, he is often the one in charge of a situation, providing network connections, fixpacks, or reading the Help documentation to the OS-tans.
2k-kun is a rare character, but his appearance and behavior follows the style of 2k-tan, wearing business attire, fashionable reading glasses, and carries a cell-phone.
Other Sabas
Other designs by a Japanese Doujin group called "Deja Vu" exist. Futaba users consider these unofficial, "bootleg" OS-tans. (See "Dispute between Futaba Society and Deja vu" below for more detail.)
Other references
Scallion
Often the Windows girls are seen carrying a scallion. This is a pun: a popular Japanese firewall program (NEGiES) sounds like their word for "scallion" (negi) so the OS-tan carry scallions around as shields or weapons.
Breast Size, Hunger, and Memory
It has been suggested from time to time, that the breast sizes of the individual OS Tans represents their RAM size. Because Windows XP is considered a “memory hog” due to its increased resource consumption, XP-tan is incredibly well endowed (and she has no qualms for getting "upgraded" from time to time). 2K-tan normally rates as a close second given her network server functions, whereas the DOS pair are at the distant end of the spectrum.
Another theory states that the breast size of an OS Tan represents the overall "fanciness" of their graphical user interface. Since XP was designed with bells and whistles, she has the largest breasts, but DOS, being no more than a command prompt, is at the other extreme.
An alternate method of displaying memory or resource requirements in general is through the character's appetite. XP is often seen eating ridiculous amounts of food (yet never gaining an inch except perhaps her bust) because of her heftier demands on hardware.
Movement against Netrunner
Netrunner, a monthly computer magazine in Japan, introduced an image board browsing software named "Berry" in one issue. "Berry" created a surge of traffic to Futaba, as well as many inexperienced users who knew nothing about the rules and decorum of Futaba. This troubled, but did not entirely anger, Futaba users.
However, the May 2004 issue of Netrunner was bundled with a set of trading cards, depicting (among others) many original characters from Futaba-including ME-tan. As this was done without permission from the original designer of ME-tan, many people became angry with Netrunner, and the designer of ME-tan announced that it will never grant permission to use any of its work to anyone related to Netrunner.
Furthermore, users from Futaba produced a series of banners and images, indicating that it doesn't welcome anyone related to Netrunner. Several OS-tans were also included in these banners.
In one OS-tan manga, 2K-tan and XP-tan break into Netoran's office (or literally "Netrun", an abbreviation of Netrunner) to rescue the abducted ME-tan, only to find that ME-tan has already killed everybody there using a knife with the name "B. Gate" (as in Bill Gates) on it. 2K-tan and XP-tan refer to "B. Gate" as "father".
Dispute between Futaba Society and Deja Vu
(As this topic is still under discussion in Futaba with over 4000 replies, please expect upcoming update and further discussion in discussion page. Any information from Futaba users are also welcome.)
Deja Vu Art Works is a doujin group in Japan, which has published doujinshi of the OS-tan called "共有フォルＤＡ！"(Literal translation: Shared Fold-DA!). However, it has clashed with Futaba society on several points:
- Deja Vu's manga use its own design of NT-tan (Windows NT 4.0 SP6) instead of Futaba's design.
- Futaba users claimed this is disrespectful to original creators of OS-tan, hence so called "stealing" OS-tan from them.
- Deja Vu claimed it has rights to create new characters.
- Deja Vu published a 2K-tan manga with "©Deja vu" on it.
- Futaba users claimed the copyright mark showed that Deja Vu ignored the original creator of OS-tan and claimed themselves as the original creators, and are intentionally misleading others (to think so). They also showed a screenshot on the Internet, showing some other doujin group mistaken Deja Vu and "共有フォルＤＡ！" as original creator.
- Deja Vu claimed it was only a careless mistake.
- A cosplay photo of XP-tan (by MALINO, a member of Deja Vu) was posted on Futaba, while the costume's tailor only permitted the photo to be posted in a membership-based cosplay site.
- Futaba users claimed that Deja Vu posted those photos, hence violating the agreement.
- Deja Vu claimed that it only posted the photo in the members-only cosplay site, but soon somebody posted those photos on Futaba with an insult.
- Later, a Futaba user found a link (hidden by using text in the same color as the background) which later was deleted.
- Futaba users claimed this as proof that Deja vu actually violated the agreement.
- Deja Vu claimed its post was only a counter measure against the post in Futaba, and had no intention of violating the agreement. Later they deleted the link as it received complaints from the XP-tan costume's tailor.
- Later, a Futaba user found a link (hidden by using text in the same color as the background) which later was deleted.
- Originally in Deja Vu's homepage, one only claimed its manga was being published on Netrunner, but after the start of the dispute one changed its homepage and claimed that its manga on Netrunner was published without its permission.
- Futaba users claim this is a fact showing Deja Vu had been working for Netrunner.
- Deja Vu claimed the change in its homepage only reflects the facts.
- There are some other minor disputes.
To the date of writing (24 Sep 2004), it seems that the dispute still can't be resolved, or at least that the parties involved have no intention of resolving it. Generally, Futaba Society considers Deja Vu as another enemy (just like Netrunner), Deja Vu declared it would continue to publish its manga, and other people either remain neutral (e.g. the creators of ME-tan and XP-tan) or ignorant of the dispute.
Other similar designs
The following designs are similar to OS-tan but not designed by users of Futaba. They are designed by a group of closely related, but independent, artists, noticeablely temp_h [1], yoko [2], karokaro [3], and inugamix [4].
Firefox-ko
Firefox-ko is a personification of the browser Mozilla Firefox, who is usually portrayed as a japanese fox spirit (see kitsune) in shinto priestess attire by most fan-artists, although the official Mozilla Brand FAQ notes that "Firefox" is also known as the common name for the red panda. Her color set and design resemble that of the Firefox logo.
A character named Hana from the desktop mascot program Ukagaka is often mistaken for Firefox-ko when pictures appear on English-language bulletin-board sites, but she is not associated with the OS-tans. She is usually distinguishable by her preferred outfit, a navy-blue sailor fuku.
While not wide-spread, a character known as "Firebird-ko" was also created as a memorial of the old name of the browser ("Mozilla Firebird"). [5].
Thunderbird-ko
Thunderbird-ko is a personification of the mail and news client Mozilla Thunderbird. She is the best friend of Firefox-ko. She dresses like a telephone operator, carries a keyboard/monitor, and sometimes holds a letter in her hands. Similar to Firefox-ko, her color set and design resemble that of the Thunderbird logo.
Øpera-tan
Øpera-tan is a personification of the Opera (browser). This character was created in response to Lawrence Eng's recommendation on Opera branding [6] [7] [8]. As Lawrence's suggestion, she is an elegant but approachable lady wearing opera gloves. Other characteristics include the long silvery gray hair, and the purple hat with a big red letter Ø. While being an adult, the breast size of Øpera-tan is much smaller than, say, other adult Windows-tans. This probably reflects the fact that the browser is a mature product, while having low memory requirement.
Other characters
Other personifications do exist, e.g. gentooたん and SUSEたん, but they are not widely known.
See also
External links
- Posting is possible only from Japanese IP address ranges, however anyone can read regardless of location.
- No longer actively maintained.
- This imageboard's community allows contributed images and descriptions in English, however all following discussion must be in Japanese.
- An English-language OS-tan Image Board
- A current OS-tan archive, in English
- iCandies, by Satoshi ("Toy") Igarashi
- a frequently used image among various websites and messageboards, especially among computer enthusiasts and gamers. Based on the iMac.
- OS-tan avatar gallery
- Information regarding the dispute between Futaba and Deja Vu, in Japanese:
- An archive of the male OS characters (contains adult-oriented sections)