Raymond Chen has another great post about some of the classic icons from Windows 95, this time focusing on pifmgr.dll. In this file, there are a variety of random-seeming icons, and it turns out they’re random for a reason: they were just a bunch a fun, generic icons intended for people to use when creating PIF files.
The icons in pifmgr.dll were created just for fun. 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 own homemade shortcut files.
↫ Raymond Chen at The Old New Thing
For those of us who didn’t grow up with Windows, or who, god forbid, are too young to know, PIF or personal information files are effectively shortcuts to DOS programs for use in a multitasking environment. A PIF file would not only point to the relevant DOS executable, but also contain information about the environment in which said executable was supposed to run. Their history goes back to IBM’s TopView, and Microsoft later embraced and adapted them for use in Windows.
wow, these are rough looking without the natural antialiasing of a CRT monitor, but nice blast from the past.
Troels,
Those were great days when Icon Editor was freely available, and building 16×16 bitmaps by hand was still viable. Today the Firefox logo is 512×512, almost the same amount of pixels of my older monitors (640×480)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mozilla_Firefox_3.5_logo.png
When I got my 486 DX in I think 91, or 92… I ate window 3.1 alive. I bought the windows resource kit and it was a book and maybe some tools. I basically memorized the entire book. That can be downloaded still and is a very interesting read. The pif files were extremely interesting because the DOS instances could be preemptively multitasked between – each other, but were still limited by the windows 3.1 cooperative environment. So I did set up some programs to see if I could have them process something at the same time, each in it’s own DOS window, and it worked.. kind of. my 486 struggled. It obviously was not optimized for reliable preemptive multitasking. I worked at Microsoft as a contractor in 96-97. I have a friend who still works there, and was working in fonts. I told him about the preemptive multitasking between DOS windows by setting up the parameters in pif files.. and he said, “yeah, not a lot of people know that.” But it was explained in the Resource Kit document. I had a lot of fun with Win 3.1 and Win 3.11 that had 32bit file access. Windows 3.x didn’t stop you from doing very bad things, which I did often. For example when learning, I thought, “well what if you arbitrarily change a .txt to a .exe and try to run it. Win 3.1 was happy to try and as I remember, I corrupted my disk. Hah. Fun times.
laxr5rs,
What a silly thing to do 🙂
I find it hard to imagine that EXE with random text in it would run at all without the headers, Even if windows didn’t sanitize the EXE for valid structures, the odds of it successfully calling an API to write the disk seems slim. Windows crashing with the disk in an inconsistent state seems more likely,
Speaking of unexpected formats, I came across this recently…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_hid_the_facts