YC brings Mac icon designer Susan Kare on stage to revisit the 128 KB era
ycombinator · x · 2026-07-27
YC’s Startup School featured Susan Kare, the designer behind the original Macintosh interface iconography, in a moment that the poster describes as surreal.
The slide in the photo highlights a classic constraint from the early Mac era: computers took a while to boot, so users wanted a visible image on screen, and the display budget was tiny — only 128 KB — which is why icons had to fit within 32×32 pixels. The post is essentially a nostalgia-heavy industry moment around one of computing’s most iconic designers.
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