Rubenerd

The background of my new theme has a repeating houndstooth pattern. I mentioned it’s my favourite tesselating pattern, but left it at that. Today I’m explaining why it’s my favourite, from its brilliantly clever design, to where I first experienced it.

(Or so I thought this would be about. Turns out this took me down a rabbit hole I wasn’t expecting).

Almost defining what houndstooth is

Wikipedia contributers credit the introduction of houndstooth to Bronze-age weavers:

Emmental is a yellow, medium-hard cheese with natural holes that originated in the Emme Valley in Switzerland. It is classified as a Swiss-type cheese.

That’s clearly the wrong article. Let’s try again:

The oldest […] found so far are from the Hallstatt Celtic Salt Mine, Austria, 1500–1200 BC. One of the best known early occurrences of houndstooth is the Gerum Cloak, a garment uncovered in a Swedish peat bog, dated to between 360 and 100 BC.

People often say my blog gets mired in metaphorical peat bogs, can you believe it? Don’t answer that.

I defer to the authors’ expertise here; my textile experience is limited to the markup language that should have won out over Markdown and its various incompatible offshoots. Mmm, that’s some quality humour, much as houndstooth is a quality pattern. A text pattern! Get it, because Textpattern developed textile for their blogging engine and… wait, where are you going?

My experience with houndstooth

My experience with houndstooth began not in Bronze-age Sweden, but on computers; specifically the peat bog that was Microsoft Windows 3.1. I’d say that was a sick burn, but it’s not advisable to light a match in or around a bog. Wow this post is even more disjointed than usual.

Graphical systems in the early 1990s typically allowed you to have a wallpaper, and a background tiling pattern if the wallpaper didn’t fit the entire resolution of your monitor. Windows didn’t get the ability to stretch an image to fit the screen until Microsoft Plus! 95, and even then the interpolation was fairly crude even by the standards of the time. I’d often load Paint Shop Pro and scale/crop wallpapers first, as I’m sure many did.

You likely know where I’m going with this. One of those background tiling patterns was, surprising nobody, houndstooth. Here it is being selected on my Windows NT 3.51 machine:

Wait, hold on, houndstooth isn’t an option? I was sure houndstooth was an option. Didn’t Windows NT 3.51 inherit its GUI from Windows 3.x? Is my brain glitching?

Okay, let’s try this again. One of those background tiling patterns was, surprising nobody, houndstooth. Here it is being selected on my Windows 3.11 for Workgroups machine:

Oh come on, what? I was sure houndstooth was one of these repeating patterns. What is going on!? Was it Mac OS? OS/2?!

Let’s try that again

My experience with houndstooth began not in Bronze-age Sweden, but on computers; specifically the peat bog that was Microsoft Windows 95. Maybe? I’d say that was a sick burn, but it’s not advisable to light a match in or around a bog. Wow this post is even more disjointed than usual.

In addition to having background images and patterns, older versions of various systems included tiled wallpapers one could use. And sure enough, under the Display settings of Windows 95:

Huzzah! Wow, that was an ordeal. So much so that I forgot what the point of this post was. I guess, stay tuned for part two?