{"id":8643,"date":"2012-01-09T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2012-01-09T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2012\/01\/09\/what-were-some-of-the-abandoned-features-of-explorer-back-in-its-prototype-days\/"},"modified":"2012-01-09T07:00:00","modified_gmt":"2012-01-09T07:00:00","slug":"what-were-some-of-the-abandoned-features-of-explorer-back-in-its-prototype-days","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20120109-00\/?p=8643\/","title":{"rendered":"What were some of the abandoned features of Explorer back in its prototype days?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Chris asked for <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/b\/oldnewthing\/archive\/2010\/07\/20\/10040074.aspx#10040328\"> some stories about what Explorer was like in the early days<\/a>.\n Well, one thing is that the original name of Explorer was <i>Cabinet<\/i>, continuing the folder\/document metaphor by taking all your folders and documents and putting them inside a virtual <i>filing cabinet<\/i>. (Cabinet was viewed as an update to the Windows&nbsp;3.1 File Manager program, whose icon as we all know was a filing cabinet.) Some remnants of this old name can be found in places like <a href=\"http:\/\/msdn.microsoft.com\/library\/bb773207.aspx\"> the <code>CABINETSTATE<\/code> structure<\/a>. (Note that this old sense of Cabinet is unrelated to the CAB file format, which is also called Cabinet.)\n In the early versions of Cabinet, shortcuts were indicated not by a little arrow overlay but by appending &gt;&gt; to the end of the name. For example, you might see an icon on the desktop called <i>My Computer&gt;&gt;<\/i>.\n The first icon in each folder was a special icon that consisted of an upward-pointing arrow with the name <i>Up One Folder<\/i>. This was really just a leaky abstraction, exposing the <code>..<\/code> directory entry as if it were a real directory.<\/p>\n<p> We saw what the original Start menu and taskbar looked like <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/b\/oldnewthing\/archive\/2003\/09\/10\/54831.aspx\"> some time ago<\/a>, back before it was a taskbar, and also saw <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.msdn.com\/b\/oldnewthing\/archive\/2003\/07\/22\/54559.aspx\"> the precursor to the Start menu<\/a>. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Chris asked for some stories about what Explorer was like in the early days. Well, one thing is that the original name of Explorer was Cabinet, continuing the folder\/document metaphor by taking all your folders and documents and putting them inside a virtual filing cabinet. (Cabinet was viewed as an update to the Windows&nbsp;3.1 File [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[2],"class_list":["post-8643","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-history"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>Chris asked for some stories about what Explorer was like in the early days. Well, one thing is that the original name of Explorer was Cabinet, continuing the folder\/document metaphor by taking all your folders and documents and putting them inside a virtual filing cabinet. (Cabinet was viewed as an update to the Windows&nbsp;3.1 File [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8643","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8643"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8643\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8643"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8643"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8643"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}