Now make a KDE 1.1.1 theme (this was the second last release of the 1.x era, and the last to use the 256 colour palette). KDE 1.1.2, codenamed “Kolour” was controversially released with the hicolor icon set enabled as default, much to the chagrin of those on older video hardware that couldn’t handle it ;)

Actually, I seem to recall one other bit of trivia. In 1.1.1, the icons had a limited, shared palette which was something like 60 colours max. This was because there were only 256 colours available to be rendered on the whole screen, so you didn’t want to reserve all 256 with the icons. In particular, this meant more colours were available when you tried to display an image or something, reducing the amount of dithering that would occur. So the icon artists really had a much smaller available palette than even 256 colours.