Microsoft (1987)Copied

By 1987 Windows was on the market and Microsoft wanted a mark for a company that had outgrown its early-eighties self. The logo it replaced was green and all capitals, with a fanciful o built from horizontal lines that staff nicknamed the Blibbet. Contemporary trade coverage, quoted in later histories, explained that the old logo reflected how Microsoft had seen itself five years earlier.

The new wordmark was set in a heavy italic Helvetica, lowercase after the initial capital. Its signature detail is a slash cut between the o and the s, which the designer said was there to emphasise the soft in the name and to convey motion and speed. The notched o reminded people of Pac-Man's mouth, and the nickname stuck. It was introduced in February 1987 and designed in-house.

The designer was Scott Baker, and his explanation, reported in a March 1987 reseller trade magazine, has been quoted ever since: the old logo was more in keeping with how Microsoft saw itself five years earlier, while the new one used a slash to emphasise the soft and convey motion and speed. How-To Geek dates the introduction to 26 February 1987 and identifies the type as Helvetica Italic Black; it was also the first Microsoft logo to use lowercase lettering.

Not everyone was ready to let go. A Microsoft employee ran a tongue-in-cheek internal campaign to save the Blibbet; it failed. The Pac-Man logo went on to sit on Windows and Xbox through the company's most dominant decades, picking up taglines along the way, and stayed in use until 2012, making it the longest-serving Microsoft logo.

The Blibbet's fans left a record. Microsoft engineer Larry Osterman later wrote on a company blog that the old O appeared as a watermark on binders, that the campus cafeteria had served a Blibbet Burger, and that he once owned a Save the Blibbet button; the suits, he wrote, won. CNN Money retold the story when Microsoft replaced the Pac-Man logo in 2012, and How-To Geek quoted Steven Sinofsky recalling that people still talked about the Blibbet years later and that there was a lot of attachment to it.

Seen now, it is pure eighties corporate: bold, slanted, a little aggressive, with one clever cut doing all the talking. That notch is the reason it lasted. It turned a generic typeface into something recognisable at a glance, without a symbol, and gave a software company a sense of speed at a time when speed was what it was selling.