What were the MS-DOS programs that the moricons.dll icons were intended for?

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20250507-00/?p=111157

by rbanffy • 1 year ago

310 169 1 year ago

devblogs.microsoft.com

theandrewbailey• 1 year ago

Another delightful The New Old Thing post, ever living up to the name.

rbanffy• 1 year ago

I used many of those icons...

xunil2ycom• 1 year ago

Having worked at WordPerfect during the days of Windows 3.0/3.1, I'm surprised they accommodated WP with icons.

chiph• 1 year ago

My WP days were under DOS (I still remember the cardboard cheat-sheet you got with it that fit around the function keys). But I remember this DLL and wondering where they got the icons. Did they contact the vendors via official channels, or did someone at Microsoft just call up a buddy and ask them what they thought would look good?

90s_dev6• 1 year ago

When I was a kid, my dad upgraded our home computer from DOS 5 or 6 to Windows 3.11 for Workgroups. It was the first GUI that I ever used, and it was amazing comparitively. Every app was mysterious and innovative and wonderful.

I tried Borland C++ and it was absolutely confusing, but I was probably just too young. Even QBasic was deeply confusing for a long time, but eventually I finally made a simple, terribly written and horribly broken Bomberman clone.

Those looking to experience something similar to that feeling should buy pico8.

sksrbWgbfK• 1 year ago

Even QBasic was deeply confusing for a long time

For one whole year, I thought that Qbasic and Turbo Pascal were text editors that could also run games. I didn't understood that I had access to real compilers and that I could actually change the programs. Sometimes kids are stupid...

As for your Pico8 suggestion, you can always get the open-source equivalent https://tic80.com/ if you don't have the money.

90s_dev6• 1 year ago

Tic80 is great but Pico8 is better if you can afford it.

And yeah, for a while I avoided strings in QBasic because I didn't have any clue how thread or yarn or whatever had anything to do with writing programs.

asveikau2• 1 year ago

I remember being a kid and seeing BASIC in a book from the library and not understanding how to run it. I thought maybe if you saved it in a file with the right extension it would just run. Eventually I figured out how to use the interpreter.

bestham• 1 year ago

Then you learned your mistake and assumed that nibbles in FastTrackerII was coded into a module. Computers are hard.

agumonkey• 1 year ago

It's a testimony of Turbo Pascal team.. the things was so lean and swift, compilation was near transparent. All this on early pentium and old cpus..

charlieyu1• 1 year ago

I liked Turbo Pascal when I was young. Debugger just works. Peeking into variables just works.

Unfortunately, now I used print to debug for other languages because I thought debugger is too hard to setup

dec0dedab0de• 1 year ago

That's ok, it took me like a decade to realize you could edit .bas files in any text editor.

layer87• 1 year ago

This reminds me of the story of an office clerk who after using Excel for a year or two was amazed to learn that it could do calculations and wasn’t just a “tables” program.

jbverschoor• 1 year ago

Man qbasic and borland C were great on DOS

mock-possum• 1 year ago

Ah QBASIC my first love

PTOB3• 1 year ago

My first bug fix ever was getting rid of that stupid tail that kept growing and wouldn't go away when you moved in NIBBLES.BAS.

pram• 1 year ago

Borland was just confusing. One of the biggest strengths of Visual Basic was how intuitive it was, even for teenagers. There was a reason every AOL prog was written in VB!

GrumpyNl• 1 year ago

VB came around 9 years later.

rzzzt• 1 year ago

I perused the files section of qbasic.com back then: https://web.archive.org/web/20050804015051/http://www.qbasic...

(One of my favorites is "3D Experiment" in category "Graphics": it shows a wireframe model of a spaceship that can be manipulated with the keyboard.)

madaxe_again• 1 year ago

I guess I was really lucky that I started out on a bbc micro, then got my hands on a c64, then an Amiga, before finally beholding windows 3.0.

By the time I landed in the DOS world aged 8 or so, qbasic was my playground, and was easy to understand from the get-go, and Borland was where I cut my teeth writing something other than basic. One thing it took me a while to get my head around was that a 286 was not a 6502, and practically every little hack, address, anything CPU or memory architecture dependent thing I had learned was now irrelevant.

Coming from Amiga workbench to windows actually felt like a downgrade in many ways, but it was the computer available to me at the time, and retrospectively a good move, as by 3.11 it was clear the wind was blowing to PCs.

Either way, for me, growing with the machine was absolutely formative - the abstraction grew as I did, and I had started near the bottom.

FireBeyond2• 1 year ago

My college decided C++ was the first language they’d teach us. There was definitely a curve there.

90s_dev6• 1 year ago

Word Perfect!!! I'm almost positive that was the editor they taught me in the early 1990s in grammar school! (We called it grammar school back then, for it was the 1800s.) And yet I had never seen or used it since. This brings back so many memories. I was sitting next to a girl named Dana, the only Dana I ever met.

teddyh• 1 year ago

Maybe her parents liked Ghostbusters?

jonhohle• 1 year ago

While it’s hard to imagine someone using Word Perfect in grammar school born during or after 1984, I hold out hope that her middle initial was “Z”.

That said, I believe I learned spreadsheets in high school using Lotus for DOS in 1996, but can’t imagine kids 3 years later still doing the same.

onionisafruit• 1 year ago

It was huge back then, but it tanked in the transition to Windows. I kept using the DOS version for years after that because I had muscle memory for WordPerfect’s shortcuts and liked the reveal codes feature.

Also I’ve met two Danas that I can remember. Both were lovely people.

MBCook6• 1 year ago

Yep. It was THE program. A bit like how Office was THE program in the late 90s and in the 2000s before Google Docs really started taking off.

The kind of thing people bought computers for. You didn’t need a computer. You needed Word Perfect.

I still remember the little card you could put above the function keys on your keyboard that showed you what alt-F7 or ctrl-F9 did. Each modifier was a different color.

First program I remember seeing people really use on a computer when I was a kid.

nubinetwork• 1 year ago

WordPerfect 7 during the win95 era was alright... but businesses went office, and compatibility was a crapshoot, so home users followed suit.

asveikau2• 1 year ago

I recall hearing that WordPerfect usage survived longer in the legal field.

I also remember in the late 90s, before StarOffice/OpenOffice/LibreOffice took off, WordPerfect had a resurgence on Linux, because there was a need for a word processor. I seem to recall a distro shipping with it prominently. Was it Corel Linux?

Sharlin2• 1 year ago

When I first read the Hitchhiker’s Guide, I thought “Ford Prefect” was a pun on “Word Perfect”, not knowing anything about the car model at the time.

PTOB3• 1 year ago

Man, I had to use Word Perfect in school in 1997. It seemed dumb at the time, but I learned some valuable lessons about markup and the importance of seeing hidden control characters to troubleshoot formatting issues.

Theodores• 1 year ago

It was kind of Microsoft to include icons for so many products that rivalled their own. It was also a good way to get the MS-DOS user onboard with Windows, even though it was not needed for these MS-DOS applications.

Most of these MS-DOS applications installed into well known folders. Was there any tool that came with Windows to find these applications and put them in program manager groups, or was this something that one had to do for oneself?

dontdoxxme• 1 year ago

The post alludes to it, the previous post has details[1], setup did it, based on the data in APPS.INF (a massive file shipped with Windows, although you could add your own data[2]).

[1] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20250505-00/?p=11...

[2] http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/microsoft/resource_kits/0030-54... page 183

mark_undoio2• 1 year ago

Ah, lovely blast from the past! I remember finding this DLL and being delighted that I could now put pretty icons on more things.

Also remember taking ages to figure out that it meant "more icons" rather than just a silly made up word.

bombcar2• 1 year ago

Moricons' Magical Watchdog!

myself248• 1 year ago

Moraff's World was right there, it wasn't hard to think it was related.

mseepgood• 1 year ago

They were composed by Ennio Moricons.

kstrauser• 1 year ago

I can hear this comment.

mark_undoio2• 1 year ago

This made me very happy

deaddodo2• 1 year ago

Also remember taking ages to figure out that it meant "more icons" rather than just a silly made up word.

The good ole' days of having to figure out a meaningful name in 8 chars.

3036e44• 1 year ago

That is almost my favorite part of DOS retro computing. Every file to name is a little puzzle.

MisterTea• 1 year ago

Holy crap, Crosstalk XVI. Almost forgot about that one. Edit: Forgot to mention it's a terminal emulator that supported a few file transfer protocols like kermit and xmodem. My father used it to send programs to his CNC machines. I remember getting it working in Windows 3.1 but he did not like or care for Windows as all of the software he ran was DOS: Design CAD 3D, Q&A for word processing and database, and a custom payroll program his friend wrote. His favorite game was gorilla.bas.

alfiedotwtf• 1 year ago

I'm not sure about everyone else, but even though I haven't used Windows in about 23 years, every time Raymond Chen has a post on Hacker News it's always a pleasure to read.

williamcotton• 1 year ago

How many of us saw the title and the microsoft.com label and immediately knew it was Raymond Chen? He's definitely a treasure!

themadturk4• 1 year ago

Count me in!

donatj• 1 year ago

Oh man that brings back memories of Windows 3.1 and makes me feel oh so old.

discreteevent• 1 year ago

Microsoft C 7. I started programming with this for a few months before Visual C++ came out. It had a DOS IDE that was a bit like QBasic but it's hard to remember the behavior exactly.

omnibrain• 1 year ago

Those fill me with so much nostalgia. I think I read in a magazine about moricons.dll, this lead me to opening every dll and exe on our computer to look for icons.

treve• 1 year ago

Same here! It was like finding hidden treasure. On a computer without internet and not getting new software often I just wanted to look in every nook and cranny for something interesting.

larodi• 1 year ago

it is super sad, that these times lasted so little. it is perhaps also because we grew with them, but still. would've been nice if these were with us enough so that we can actually remember which was which .) i mean - they bring some vaporware nostalgia, but actually not all these icons mean at all a thing to me. i dont think they ever meant that much altogether to anyone.

mmastrac2• 1 year ago

Remember the good old days of editing PIF (Program Information Files) files [⁂]? Ah yeah.

Googling a bit, it looks like a lot of this lore has just been lost. I don't know if there are modern explanations of PIF files kicking around.

⁂ I realize this is an ATM machine phrasing, but we called them PIF files in the day.

deaddodo2• 1 year ago

There's still plenty of information on the file format kicking around:

https://www.fileformat.info/format/pif/corion.htm

https://web.archive.org/web/20220214185118/http://www.smsoft...

As well as a basic explanation of the file's purpose:

http://justsolve.archiveteam.org/wiki/Program_information_fi...

mmastrac2• 1 year ago

The second link is exactly what I was hoping for, but only seems to exist on the archive. I wasn't able to locate it or other detailed information with my cursory searches. I'm glad it was preserved.

hk1337• 1 year ago

PIF

it's also an onomatopoeia for opening up a can of biscuits

GranPC• 1 year ago

Back in the day, sending the string ".pif" to any MSN Messenger group chat was enough to immediately disable it for everyone. Fun way of dealing with spam :)

fredoralive2• 1 year ago

It’s basically just configuration data for MS-DOS apps running under Windows (or some over MS-DOS multitaskers). Stuff like EMS and XMS memory amounts, various config options etc.

Fun fact: under the hood, PIF files are sent to the same ShellExecute function as EXEs, and if you have an EXE with a PIF extension, it runs the EXE code as normal.

Funnier fact: In Windows 95 and onwards, the UI presents PIFs as a special case of shortcuts, and as with LNK files, Windows always hides (hid?) the extension, even if you have “always show extensions” on. When I get home, I’ll have to check if Windows 11 still has this behaviour…

Edit: Yeah, creating a copy of calc.exe in my ~/Documents folder and renaming it calc.docx.pif does result in a working calculator file that presents gives its name as "calc.docx", albeit with a "shortcut to generic file" icon and a type of "Shortcut to MS-DOS Program" despite the fact that I can't think of any legitimate reason to do anything with a real PIF file on Windows 11 (24H2).

hulitu• 1 year ago

Even funier fact: the fact that Windows treated pif and lnk files as executable lead to a lot of exploits.

ranger_danger• 1 year ago

I just checked on a Win11 VM, with show extensions and show hidden turned on, I created a test.pif file on the desktop and the extension is NOT visible. It appears as a shortcut with the little arrow on the icon, and the properties list the file type as "Shortcut to MS-DOS Program (.pif)".

layer87• 1 year ago

Pretty unconventional to use an asterism as a footnote symbol.

jandrese• 1 year ago

Looking at the icons now I feel the ones where Microsoft put the icon on top of a row of horizontal lines are hard to read at a glance. The lines make the icon visually busy. Probably not so bad when you are on a 640x480 display and those icons are relatively large, but on a modern display they're a bit hard to make out.

sintezcs• 1 year ago

I’m really amazed by the fact how expressive and solid such low-res icons can be. Creating them is a true art

90s_dev6• 1 year ago

Can I quote you when I finally release my app in a week or two?

xp842• 1 year ago

Indeed - we now routinely do so much less with so much more!

jannes• 1 year ago

Try this CSS if you want to zoom in without the icons turning into a blurry mess:

  img {
    image-rendering: pixelated;
  }

mmh0000• 1 year ago

Now, this is the kind of obscure hacking I'm on HN for!

Also, I wish I had known about that little trick ... years ... ago.

layer87• 1 year ago

There should be an `image-rendering: crt;`.

kragen2• 1 year ago

This is the kind of thing you should implement in a JS library, or by preprocessing the image before you upload it to the web site, not add to the browser platform spec.

aabajian• 1 year ago

Max nostalgia. When I was ~12 years old I had an 386 PC we got for $5 from the thrift store across from the dump (a bargain for sure even at that time). I had to self-teach myself about DOS, BASIC, Win 3.1, etc. I somehow broke the Win 3.1 installation and all I could find was Win 3.0 on floppy disc. I got the thing reinstalled, but found that the sound drivers didn't work, random programs wouldn't open, and it kept crashing.

I learned years later that there are a huge number of changes between 3.1 and 3.0. The biggest being support for more memory and multimedia extensions. The latter was the first time I learned what a dynamic link library (DLL) was and that took me down the rabbit hole of C++.

chuckadams• 1 year ago

I just can't get me enough of Raymond Chen and his wonderful walks down the dustier paths of memory lane. Feels like a more innocent time where I didn't feel like I was imminently going to be turned into paperclips.

avidiax• 1 year ago

Yeah, the sense at that time was that you master the machine. Now, increasingly, the machines will master you if you aren't careful. Of course, the machines haven't really done anything to us. They've just been locked down and remotely controlled to deliver ads and misinformation.

deadbabe• 1 year ago

The greatest trick machines ever pulled was making us believe they haven’t done anything to us.

EvanAnderson6• 1 year ago

...you master the machine. Now, increasingly, the machines will master you...

Today I bump into limitations of machines that were put there by manufacturers who are trying to assert ownership of the device after the purchase. In the "before times" limitations were either a fact of the hardware (i.e. you only have so much RAM, storage, CPU cycles, etc) or of your own ability (you don't know how to crack the protection, defeat the anti-debug tricks, etc). Today you're waging a nearly unwinnable battle against architectures of control baked-in to the hardware at a level below a level that the average end user has any hope of usurping.

The machine isn't trying to master me. The people who made the machine are. I wish people in the tech industry wouldn't be party to taking away computing freedom. It pays well, though, and they can console themselves with "It's not a computer, it's a phone"-type delusions (at least until the day "the man" comes for their PCs).

yongjik• 1 year ago

That's just past with its rose-tinted glasses. It was easy for someone to master the machine when that someone was a university researcher or a lone gamer, the most precious resource stored in the machine was saved term projects, and either it was not connected to anything else, or connected to fellow university researchers.

The stake was low, because nobody could use your computer to drain your bank account. And someone who would "prank" your computer beyond the social norm would get a stern talking to.

Computers these days have to support your grandma making hotel reservations online without her entire financial information being sent to hackers in Eastern Europe. They're doing jobs that 70s OS designers never thought about. It's a different world.

6502nerdface• 1 year ago

James Yeh, Ken Griffin's "first quant" and eventual co-CIO of Citadel, used to say, when annoyed by a junior who was overfitting to the backtest, "I don't let the computer boss me around! I tell the computer what to do!"

slipnslider• 1 year ago

I love his posts. Read every one of them.

layer87• 1 year ago

It’s probably partially an illusion, but while everything wasn’t fine back then, it seemed that there was at least a vision of a positive self-determined computing future that could be achieved and that we were roughly on-track on. Nowadays it feels more of a fight to keep things not getting worse, most of the time.

bombcar2• 1 year ago

Computers were so new for most people that they weren't really yet on the "critical path".

And when you got them working, they saved so much time that you had extra time laying around.

ryoshu• 1 year ago

Building value vs extracting value.

CWuestefeld• 1 year ago

I agree, but I also think it goes farther than computers and technology. Back then the overall zeitgeist was just a whole lot more positive. These days people are all about one-upping on the dark grittiness of music, movies, etc. But back then things were more upbeat. Yeah, we were worried about the cold war and nuclear armageddon, etc. But we still felt hopeful that we were working toward something better. I miss that.

exikyut• 1 year ago

Zeroing in on this exact sentiment:

...that could be achieved and that we were roughly on-track on.

I think there's a strong lateral connection to this quote:

“I've come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:

1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

2. Anything that's invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

3. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”

― Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time

I think this has interesting implications wrt the perception of nostalgia, because nostalgia seems to be able to apply at any age to any event that happened far enough back in time; while the above theoretical model maps roughly to specific ages.

So I wonder what things are actually a partially overlapped Venn diagram of the above maxim and nostalgia.

In this case I think it's possible the idea that we were "roughly on-track on" with certain technologies - the notion of an emergent sense of structure that was certain to unfold - could map to some point in between points (1) and (2) in the maxim above. An objective analyses would instead recognize "success" as the survivorship bias that it is; but we're not objective :) - and I find that endlessly fascinating!

plastic3169• 1 year ago

I once met this older gentleman at a wedding and when I asked about his life he said he used to be really into computers but the personal computing revolution made him sour. It turned professional field step by step into junk until there was only amateurs with their toy computers left.

ferguess_k• 1 year ago

I'd say, go back to the hardware. Pick a computer hobby that involves tinkering the hardware, not just the software. Holding something on one's hand means a lot.

bitwize3• 1 year ago

N.B. Access for DOS was not a database. It was a communications program with preconfigured settings for popular services like CompuServe and Dow Jones. It wasn't generic like Crosstalk (also featured); to my knowledge it couldn't do anything that it didn't have a configuration for. Clearly aimed at the "on the go" business person who wanted to check stock prices or something without worrying about baud rates or stop bits.

recursive• 1 year ago

I didn't know these were intended for anything. I thought they were provided to users as a swiss-army knife of reasonably expressive icons for use however they saw fit.

At least that's how I used them.

jelder• 1 year ago

Why can I hear these icons?

Seriously, all of the window .wav files just got loaded from my long term memory, along with the sound of Windows launching from a magnetic HDD.

Calwestjobs2• 1 year ago

Oh yeah, sound of rats inside of water pipe.

OR floppy sound - startup button, boop beep trrrrrrrr bomp.

ryandrake• 1 year ago

One thing the article did not answer is “why?” I think I am missing something but why did Microsoft feel they needed to ship icons for other software vendors’ applications? Wouldn’t Lotus and Quicken want to ship their own icons with their software?

shdon• 1 year ago

These were existing MS-DOS programmes that had already shipped. They wouldn't have shipped with a Windows icon as they were made before that Windows version existed (or at least shipped) and weren't even intended to run on that platform. Once Windows had shipped, and software vendors started making software for it, they will of course have included their own icons. The "why" is simply Microsoft wanting to make Windows play nice with users' existing software, and thus enhancing the user experience.

ok123456• 1 year ago

Part of the Windows 3.1 installer would search your hard drive for existing applications and add them to the Program Manager. Many of these were DOS applications that had no embedded icon resources. To keep them from all being default applications, they used this little DLL database of icons.

indymike• 1 year ago

Microsoft wanted to make their new GUI shell for dos look good. There were no apps with icons so they put the most popular and some good stand ins so their new GUI file manager/launcher worked well.

Narishma• 1 year ago

The 'why' was answered in the first article of this series.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20250505-00/?p=11...

layer87• 1 year ago

The article links to earlier blog posts that explain the “why”.

wormius• 1 year ago

They did Turbo Pascal dirty with those icons... I get that Borland C++ also was blue/yellow for the DOS versions (looks like they stopped the DOS version of it in 1993 with version 4). And I assume these were from the early days of Windows so it was a DOS product at that point, but... Man. Poor TP, getting the shaft.

I loved TP, in 93 it was the language we learned for programming in high school. My first compiler was Borland C++ 4.5 bought used from ebay LOL.

ulrikrasmussen• 1 year ago

I remember clicking many of these as a kid on my friends dads computer and being disappointed because it wasn't the game I thought it was. I particularly remember the FoxPro icon.

pavlov2• 1 year ago

Roman numerals in software versioning should make a comeback.

The Cicero-approved desktop of MS-DOS programs from this moricons.dll set would include these:

Applause II 1.5

Framework III

Crosstalk-XVI 3.71

PC Paintbrush IV Plus

And of course you’d want dBase III+ and Deluxe Paint II Enhanced.

PTOB3• 1 year ago

I support this. "Windows XI" looks so much more professional and enigmatic.

pavlov2• 1 year ago

This website best experienced with Chrome CXXXVII+ on Windows XI Enhanced.

AStonesThrow• 1 year ago

You may laugh, but when I heard that Microsoft was working on code-name "Cairo" I turned that around phonetically in my head until I realized they were indeed referring to "Windows Chi-Rho".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chi_Rho

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_XP

int_19h2• 1 year ago

They should go all the way to Windows MMXXV etc.

joemi• 1 year ago

No thanks. Then it just causes confusion when some people use the roman numerals and other people convert them to arabic numerals. Especially for cases like Applause and Crosstalk mentioned above.

themadturk4• 1 year ago

Lotus I-II-III?

barbs• 1 year ago

I always thought the fancy DOS icon meant the program was broken - it looked sort of like a sinking ship to me.

calrain• 1 year ago

I used these all the time when rolling out Windows 3.1 and 3.11 for thousands of computers back in the early 90's.

You would just pick any icon that seemed relevant, with a focus on not choosing the same icon for two different applications.

Computer GUI's were so new then that people didn't really care if the icon was 100% correct or not.

Sometimes for big applications I would draw up an icon and then use it, but mainly try to stay on moricons.dll or any dll's that came with the application that might contain icons.

qingcharles• 1 year ago

This. You just needed something and we were starved for icons with the default install, so I would just dig around to find an icon that half-way matched what the application (never "app" then) was.

torben-friis• 1 year ago

I find it funny that I use adaptive icons on android (the ones that switch color according to the OS color scheme) and I override non adaptive app icons the exact same way.

Local public transport app? Choose something resembling a bus, train or similar. Banking app? Pile of money or bill or whatever. Just as long as two apps don’t end up with the same icon it’s all fine.

What is old is new I guess.

Dwedit• 1 year ago

I wonder how many people out there actually created an icon for Kid Pix and used the icon from Moricons.dll? I was one of those people.

sweeter2• 1 year ago

Did they store the icons as byte arrays?

int_19h2• 1 year ago

As it happens, Raymond Chen has a blog post on that, too.

https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20231025-00/?p=10...

sweeter2• 1 year ago

Thank you!

filchermcurr• 1 year ago

Man, things had character back then. Everything is so flat and boring now.

More importantly, though, Raymond Chen is an absolute treasure. I love these posts.

dustractor• 1 year ago

Harvard Graphics! That's where it all started for me.

What were the MS-DOS programs that the moricons.dll icons were intended for?

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