Program Manager

~ the last words ~

There is a file on your Windows 11 machine called MORICONS.DLL. Microsoft added it in 1992 so that Program Manager would have icons to draw for MS-DOS programs that shipped without any. Thirty-four years later it is still in the system folder of an operating system that has not been able to run Program Manager since 2007. The icon library outlived the program that needed it by two decades and nobody has got around to deleting it.

Program Manager arrived with Windows 3.0 on 22 May 1990 and replaced MS-DOS Executive, which had been a file listing with a menu bar over it. What it did instead was refuse to show you files. You got one large window, and inside it a set of smaller windows called groups, and inside those, icons. Main and Accessories came with the machine. You dragged programs into the group you wanted them in and that arrangement was your computer. There was no desktop underneath, because the desktop was Program Manager, maximized, always.

It ran that way for five years, across Windows 3.x and the early Windows NT releases. IBM shipped the entire Windows layer inside OS/2 under the name Win-OS/2, so it ran there too. Then Windows 95 landed on 24 August 1995 with the Start menu and a taskbar, and Program Manager stopped being the shell on the day it stopped being new. Windows NT 4.0 followed a year later.

Its five years as the shell ran out three years before i had a modem of my own. What i met was the leftover rather than the thing: PROGMAN.EXE was still sitting in the system folder of every Windows through XP, still ran when you typed its name into the Run box, and still opened the 1990 desktop on top of the 1998 one. That is the honest distance on this grave: what i know of Program Manager comes from Microsoft leaving it lying around, not from ever having to depend on it.

~ the record ~

~ the group file ~

The groups were real files. Each one lived on disk as a.GRP, a small binary holding icon positions and the paths of the programs they pointed at, and PROGMAN.INI held the list of which groups to load. This is the part that dated fastest and the part that mattered most at the time, because it meant an installer could write a group onto your machine without asking. Half of what a Windows 3.1 setup program did was drop a.GRP file and tell Program Manager to pick it up.

It also meant your arrangement was portable and fragile in the same breath. Copy the.GRP files and you copied your desktop layout. Move the programs and every icon in the group pointed at nothing, with no repair path except opening properties on each one and typing the new path in. The Start menu solved that by making shortcuts ordinary files in an ordinary folder, which sounds obvious and took Microsoft five years.

~ the leftover years ~

The interesting part of this obit is the eleven years between losing the job and losing the file. Microsoft kept shipping PROGMAN.EXE all the way through Windows XP, because corporate deployments had been built on it and because the registry still let an administrator set it as the shell instead of Explorer. Change one Winlogon value and the machine booted to 1990. Some hospitals and factory floors were still doing exactly that well into the 2000s, on the reasonable grounds that a shell with no web browser in it cannot be used to browse the web.

So for over a decade the program existed in a strange condition, fully supported and chosen by almost nobody. Most people who opened it in that window opened it once, by accident or curiosity, looked at the empty gray groups, and closed it again.

~ the stub ~

The real death is quieter than the removal. Service Pack 2 for Windows XP reached Windows Update on 25 August 2004, and it replaced PROGMAN.EXE with a compatibility stub. The file was still there and still ran, and what it did when you ran it was open an Explorer window and exit. Anything that asked for Program Manager got Explorer with no error and no explanation, which is the most Microsoft way imaginable to retire something.

The file itself came off with Windows Vista, which reached shops on 30 January 2007. No stub and no compatibility path, and nothing named PROGMAN anywhere in the system. Except MORICONS.DLL, which is still shipping, still full of little DOS icons for WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3, waiting for a program that has not existed for nineteen years to ask it for a picture.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »