Microsoft's ancient icon library still lurks deep within Windows 11
- Reference: 1761053155
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2025/10/21/windows_pifmgr_chen/
- Source link:
As with the icons found in moricons.dll and progman.exe , pifmgr.dll contains a set of icons designed in an era when color and pixels were considerably more limited than the artistic endeavors of today. This author remembers squinting at a 16 x 16 grid to create something the user might recognize, using just 16 colors.
Microsoft filled pifmgr.dll with a selection of icons that a user might find handy to represent an MS-DOS application on the Windows desktop.
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"The pifmgr.dll file was added in Windows 95," [2]explained Chen. "Its job was, as the name might suggest, to manage PIF files, which are Program Information Files that describe how to set up a virtual MS-DOS session for running a specific application."
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Whereas the icons in progman.exe and moricons.dll were created with specific applications or categories in mind, what was in pifmgr.dll was a bit of fluff.
[5]Microsoft veteran explains Windows quirk that made videos play in Paint
[6]Windows 95 was too fat to install itself so needed help from the slimmer 3.1
[7]Why Microsoft has the name of an old mouse hidden in its Bluetooth drivers
[8]Why Windows 95 left a handy power saving feature on the cutting-room floor
"The icons in pifmgr.dll were created just for fun," he said. "They were not created with any particular programs in mind, with one obvious exception. They were just a fun mix of icons for people to use for their homemade shortcut files."
Or perhaps the Microsoft team that came up with them all those decades ago had glimpsed the future and wanted to use pifmgr.dll to warn future generations. There is, for example, a window through which clouds can be seen – a reference to Azure for sure. Then there is an image of a cloud with lightning – surely a warning about [9]this week's catastrophic AWS outage . There's also a play block on which the letters A and I are seen (OK, it's probably A and the number 1, but let's not quibble about details).
And finally, there's an apple with a bite taken out of the left side instead of the right side of Apple's famous logo. Chen speculated: "Coincidence? Tip of the hat? Subtle jab? You decide."
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The icons are chock full of '90s whimsy, and pifmgr.dll is still found in Windows 11, although at 36 kilobytes it also speaks of a time when things were not quite as bloated as they are today. ®
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[2] https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20251020-00/?p=111706
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aPeuFm3bMYz0PtOfEGrdQQAAAsw&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
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[5] https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/15/windows_paint_video_chen/
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/29/chen_windows_95_install/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/17/chen_bluetooth_driver/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/09/chen_windows_95_hlt/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/20/amazon_aws_outage/
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[11] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Using executable file formats for ions. Why?
Incompetence.
People like to pretend MicroSloth was competent at some point in the past. They never were.
Exe file always included icons, for itself and for other purposes like for the OS to use for its specific file types.
That's the way it was/is. Fun fact: fonts were actually (resource-only) DLLs. So if you made one with a DllMain function, then that would execute - in the same context as the loading program - when the font loaded.
For fun
Today if you done something "for fun" at corporation and let alone shipped it, you'd be sacked on the spot.
Then an audit would have been triggered to check if other employees are having fun.
Fun is only allowed if it has a user story, acceptance criteria and is ready to pick up in the current sprint.
Re: For fun
My favourite undocumented feature was the teapot appearing once in a blue moon during the Pipes 3-D screen saver on NT4. Just wonderfully bonkers.
Re: For fun
We had a shared machine in the middle of my engineering department which often had the Pipes screensaver showing. The apprentices used to shout "Teapot" every time one appeared, and yet never understood why I berated them for timewasting ... Back then, just staring at a screen while the computer did all the work wasn't considered a useful role. How times have changed ...
Re: For fun
Ages ago in one of the company product, someone implemented animated person walking from left to right of the screen, but stopping in the middle with a text "What are you looking at?", pausing and then continuing the walk and disappearing forever. It supposed to appear once on 29th Feb when product was used.
Re: For fun
When the great appraiser comes to write against your name,
He writes not that you won or lost but how you adhered to the company SAFe variant
Always used to use the beach ball for batch files, for no better reason than it stood out nicely from the rest of the desktop...