Last time, we learned the history of moricons.dll, and along the way learned about legacy icons in progman.exe. But what are the icons?
Today, we’ll look at the bonus icons in progman.exe. Some of them were auto-assigned by Windows to some programs. Others were just fun icons that you could use for your own Program Manager items.
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[MS-DOS spreadsheet]
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[MS-DOS communications]
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[MS-DOS generic program]
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[paint] PFS: First Graphics |
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[bar chart] | |||
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[camera] | |||
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[CD-based program] Microsoft Bookshelf |
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[clapboard] | |||
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[drafting]
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[desktop publishing] PFS: First Publisher Soft Kicker Ventura Publisher |
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[filmstrip] | |||
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[graphing] Microsoft Chart GraphWriter |
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[handshake] | |||
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[utilities]
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[mail] Lotus Express |
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[fine art] | |||
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[newspaper] | |||
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[telephone] | |||
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[plain document] | |||
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[spreadsheet] | |||
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[sticky note] | |||
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[cassette tape] | |||
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[typewriter] Norton Line Printer |
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[briefcase] | |||
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[door] | |||
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[large envelope] | |||
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[mailbox] | |||
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[safe] CP Anti-Virus |
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[help] Norton Time Mark |
It appears that at the start, the visual language was that MS-DOS programs were represented as a program running inside a frame, the frame representing the GUI frame around the MS-DOS session. (Also known informally as the MS-DOS “box”.)
Windows used the information in the APPS.INF file to identify these executables and associate them with icons and PIF file configurations.
Next time, we’ll look at the icons in moricons.dll.
The coloring of the first three icons in the list jumped out at me: Blue for word processing, green for spreadsheet and purple for database. This is, of course, exactly the color convention used by Microsoft Office since at least Office 97.
However, versions of Word and Excel from the Windows 3.1 era seem to both use an "aqua" color in their icons, and Access's first icon featured a yellow key - although the Access 1.0 UI does appear to use purple as an accent color.
This makes me wonder whether the Office icon designers were somehow inspired by moricons (or...
Sorry for being off-topic here, I wonder if you know about EXEPack? I found that some EXEPacked programs in Windows 95 (for example, EDIT.COM, DOSSETUP.BIN, and WinME’s scandisk.exe) have a special “overlay” right after EXE header, and un-EXEPacking them will cause those programs no longer able to be executed.
Many of these would be fine icons even today if not for the size, IMHO. The focus on abstract icons is gone way too far. On the other hand, many of these concrete objects no longer have a purpose in today’s world, so perhaps are best relegated to social media icons like on this website. Fair use?
Win98 moricons.dll is the source of icons I personally am quite familiar with, since I used to use that OS version up to 2008 on everyday basis and the computer is still there, at my parents’ house, and the original Win98 installation works. I even used it to check if my stupidly simple 4k demo written to somehow inspire students learn assembly would run there. And it actually did after a small change related to back buffer format for Direct3D9.
But if we focus on Win 3.1, I’ll have to either go to my university workplace or run a virtual machine...
These icons are somewhat dated but still beautiful. The filmstrip and newspaper are low-color pixel perfection.
The cassette tape is really nice. Computing was actually fun back then, making do with limited resources down to the last byte.
I had similar thoughts as I looked through these, and a lot of “They don’t make icons like they used to.”