What were the MS-DOS programs that the moricons.dll icons were intended for?
112 comments
·May 13, 2025chuckadams
avidiax
Yeah, the sense at that time was that you master the machine. Now, increasingly, the machines will master you if you aren't careful. Of course, the machines haven't really done anything to us. They've just been locked down and remotely controlled to deliver ads and misinformation.
yongjik
That's just past with its rose-tinted glasses. It was easy for someone to master the machine when that someone was a university researcher or a lone gamer, the most precious resource stored in the machine was saved term projects, and either it was not connected to anything else, or connected to fellow university researchers.
The stake was low, because nobody could use your computer to drain your bank account. And someone who would "prank" your computer beyond the social norm would get a stern talking to.
Computers these days have to support your grandma making hotel reservations online without her entire financial information being sent to hackers in Eastern Europe. They're doing jobs that 70s OS designers never thought about. It's a different world.
EvanAnderson
> ...you master the machine. Now, increasingly, the machines will master you...
Today I bump into limitations of machines that were put there by manufacturers who are trying to assert ownership of the device after the purchase. In the "before times" limitations were either a fact of the hardware (i.e. you only have so much RAM, storage, CPU cycles, etc) or of your own ability (you don't know how to crack the protection, defeat the anti-debug tricks, etc). Today you're waging a nearly unwinnable battle against architectures of control baked-in to the hardware at a level below a level that the average end user has any hope of usurping.
The machine isn't trying to master me. The people who made the machine are. I wish people in the tech industry wouldn't be party to taking away computing freedom. It pays well, though, and they can console themselves with "It's not a computer, it's a phone"-type delusions (at least until the day "the man" comes for their PCs).
grishka
Our civilization desperately needs a way to modify modern microelectronics at home or at least in a well-equipped repair shop.
Regular people being able to commit contempt of companies' business models en masse seems to work well to keep them in check, but it's becoming ever harder with so much of everything becoming mobile-centric. And with all smartphones being locked down at the level of someone else's public keys being burned into the SoC at the factory, you can't do shit. They literally have technological supremacy over the rest of the humanity. And we're somehow okay with that.
Terr_
"The first thing we do, is we kill all the law--" Er, I mean abolish the DMCA.
Picking a lock on a device you own shouldn't be a federal crime.
readthenotes1
Before the before times, there are claims that IBM os360 would be delivered purposely handicapped until you paid the extra fees for the upgrade
JadeNB
> Today I bump into limitations of machines that were put there by manufacturers who are trying to assert ownership of the device after the purchase. In the "before times" limitations were either a fact of the hardware (i.e. you only have so much RAM, storage, CPU cycles, etc) or of your own ability (you don't know how to crack the protection, defeat the anti-debug tricks, etc). Today you're waging a nearly unwinnable battle against architectures of control baked-in to the hardware at a level below a level that the average end user has any hope of usurping.
Even in the "before times" we had such limitations: the 486 was shipped as a cheaper version with a functional but disabled math coprocessor. There are meaningful differences in practical terms, but I definitely see it as a clear predecessor of this behavior.
deadbabe
The greatest trick machines ever pulled was making us believe they haven’t done anything to us.
JadeNB
> The greatest trick machines ever pulled was making us believe they haven’t done anything to us.
While "guns don't kill people, people kill people" is a cliché, I think there's still considerable meaning behind it, and I'd say the same holds in the "machines don't do anything to people" sense. Sure, a lot of decision-making and faceless authority is outsourced to machines, but it's still people who are doing that outsourcing, and if those people stopped deciding to put so much weight on the output of (intentionally and unintentionally) black-boxed algorithms then that power of the machines would vanish instantly.
slipnslider
I love his posts. Read every one of them.
omnibrain
Those fill me with so much nostalgia. I think I read in a magazine about moricons.dll, this lead me to opening every dll and exe on our computer to look for icons.
treve
Same here! It was like finding hidden treasure. On a computer without internet and not getting new software often I just wanted to look in every nook and cranny for something interesting.
larodi
it is super sad, that these times lasted so little. it is perhaps also because we grew with them, but still. would've been nice if these were with us enough so that we can actually remember which was which .) i mean - they bring some vaporware nostalgia, but actually not all these icons mean at all a thing to me. i dont think they ever meant that much altogether to anyone.
90s_dev
When I was a kid, my dad upgraded our home computer from DOS 5 or 6 to Windows 3.11 for Workgroups. It was the first GUI that I ever used, and it was amazing comparitively. Every app was mysterious and innovative and wonderful.
I tried Borland C++ and it was absolutely confusing, but I was probably just too young. Even QBasic was deeply confusing for a long time, but eventually I finally made a simple, terribly written and horribly broken Bomberman clone.
Those looking to experience something similar to that feeling should buy pico8.
sksrbWgbfK
> Even QBasic was deeply confusing for a long time
For one whole year, I thought that Qbasic and Turbo Pascal were text editors that could also run games. I didn't understood that I had access to real compilers and that I could actually change the programs. Sometimes kids are stupid...
As for your Pico8 suggestion, you can always get the open-source equivalent https://tic80.com/ if you don't have the money.
agumonkey
It's a testimony of Turbo Pascal team.. the things was so lean and swift, compilation was near transparent. All this on early pentium and old cpus..
stevekemp
I continue to run Turbo Pascal on a Z80-based machine, with 64k of RAM. A pentium would be luxury!
charlieyu1
I liked Turbo Pascal when I was young. Debugger just works. Peeking into variables just works.
Unfortunately, now I used print to debug for other languages because I thought debugger is too hard to setup
90s_dev
Tic80 is great but Pico8 is better if you can afford it.
And yeah, for a while I avoided strings in QBasic because I didn't have any clue how thread or yarn or whatever had anything to do with writing programs.
EvanAnderson
Sharing fun kid computer misconceptions:
I used a version of BASIC on my father's accounting computer that had an error message which included the word "ILLEGAL" (I forget what it was, exactly). I always assumed it had something to do with tax laws and the computer warning you not to break them.
Sharlin
I remember being confused why the Pascal/Delphi fractional numbers were called Single, Double, and Real. Like what did those words have to do with being able to use the decimal point?
dec0dedab0de
That's ok, it took me like a decade to realize you could edit .bas files in any text editor.
asveikau
I remember being a kid and seeing BASIC in a book from the library and not understanding how to run it. I thought maybe if you saved it in a file with the right extension it would just run. Eventually I figured out how to use the interpreter.
xnorswap
You've reminded me of how I near bricked the family 386 because I wanted to more easily play GORILLAS.BAS.
I was quite used to loading it up in QBASIC.EXE and then executing it to play.
But I wanted to just run it by opening the file in DOSSHELL.
I knew Windows (possibly just DOSSHELL?) had the concept of file associations, so there I went reassociating things in ways I thought might get .BAS to "just run". It didn't work to get gorillas working, and in the process it seemed to mess up a bunch of other things.
This was very late for still using a 386, I think our friends had pentiums by this point.
I don't know if my Dad realised what I'd done and kept quiet about it, or just didn't realise how I'd been fiddling with those settings, but I think the extra "things seem wonky" was a nice excuse for us to finally get upgraded into the windows 95 and CD-ROM era.
bestham
Then you learned your mistake and assumed that nibbles in FastTrackerII was coded into a module. Computers are hard.
rzzzt
I perused the files section of qbasic.com back then: https://web.archive.org/web/20050804015051/http://www.qbasic...
(One of my favorites is "3D Experiment" in category "Graphics": it shows a wireframe model of a spaceship that can be manipulated with the keyboard.)
pram
Borland was just confusing. One of the biggest strengths of Visual Basic was how intuitive it was, even for teenagers. There was a reason every AOL prog was written in VB!
GrumpyNl
VB came around 9 years later.
jbverschoor
Man qbasic and borland C were great on DOS
mock-possum
Ah QBASIC my first love
PTOB
My first bug fix ever was getting rid of that stupid tail that kept growing and wouldn't go away when you moved in NIBBLES.BAS.
madaxe_again
I guess I was really lucky that I started out on a bbc micro, then got my hands on a c64, then an Amiga, before finally beholding windows 3.0.
By the time I landed in the DOS world aged 8 or so, qbasic was my playground, and was easy to understand from the get-go, and Borland was where I cut my teeth writing something other than basic. One thing it took me a while to get my head around was that a 286 was not a 6502, and practically every little hack, address, anything CPU or memory architecture dependent thing I had learned was now irrelevant.
Coming from Amiga workbench to windows actually felt like a downgrade in many ways, but it was the computer available to me at the time, and retrospectively a good move, as by 3.11 it was clear the wind was blowing to PCs.
Either way, for me, growing with the machine was absolutely formative - the abstraction grew as I did, and I had started near the bottom.
mmastrac
Remember the good old days of editing PIF (Program Information Files) files [⁂]? Ah yeah.
Googling a bit, it looks like a lot of this lore has just been lost. I don't know if there are modern explanations of PIF files kicking around.
⁂ I realize this is an ATM machine phrasing, but we called them PIF files in the day.
GranPC
Back in the day, sending the string ".pif" to any MSN Messenger group chat was enough to immediately disable it for everyone. Fun way of dealing with spam :)
deaddodo
There's still plenty of information on the file format kicking around:
https://www.fileformat.info/format/pif/corion.htm
https://web.archive.org/web/20220214185118/http://www.smsoft...
As well as a basic explanation of the file's purpose:
http://justsolve.archiveteam.org/wiki/Program_information_fi...
mmastrac
The second link is exactly what I was hoping for, but only seems to exist on the archive. I wasn't able to locate it or other detailed information with my cursory searches. I'm glad it was preserved.
hk1337
> PIF
it's also an onomatopoeia for opening up a can of biscuits
mark_undoio
Ah, lovely blast from the past! I remember finding this DLL and being delighted that I could now put pretty icons on more things.
Also remember taking ages to figure out that it meant "more icons" rather than just a silly made up word.
deaddodo
> Also remember taking ages to figure out that it meant "more icons" rather than just a silly made up word.
The good ole' days of having to figure out a meaningful name in 8 chars.
jannes
Try this CSS if you want to zoom in without the icons turning into a blurry mess:
img {
image-rendering: pixelated;
}mmh0000
Now, this is the kind of obscure hacking I'm on HN for!
Also, I wish I had known about that little trick ... years ... ago.
aabajian
Max nostalgia. When I was ~12 years old I had an 386 PC we got for $5 from the thrift store across from the dump (a bargain for sure even at that time). I had to self-teach myself about DOS, BASIC, Win 3.1, etc. I somehow broke the Win 3.1 installation and all I could find was Win 3.0 on floppy disc. I got the thing reinstalled, but found that the sound drivers didn't work, random programs wouldn't open, and it kept crashing.
I learned years later that there are a huge number of changes between 3.1 and 3.0. The biggest being support for more memory and multimedia extensions. The latter was the first time I learned what a dynamic link library (DLL) was and that took me down the rabbit hole of C++.
sintezcs
I’m really amazed by the fact how expressive and solid such low-res icons can be. Creating them is a true art
xp84
Indeed - we now routinely do so much less with so much more!
90s_dev
Can I quote you when I finally release my app in a week or two?
ryandrake
One thing the article did not answer is “why?” I think I am missing something but why did Microsoft feel they needed to ship icons for other software vendors’ applications? Wouldn’t Lotus and Quicken want to ship their own icons with their software?
shdon
These were existing MS-DOS programmes that had already shipped. They wouldn't have shipped with a Windows icon as they were made before that Windows version existed (or at least shipped) and weren't even intended to run on that platform. Once Windows had shipped, and software vendors started making software for it, they will of course have included their own icons. The "why" is simply Microsoft wanting to make Windows play nice with users' existing software, and thus enhancing the user experience.
ok123456
Part of the Windows 3.1 installer would search your hard drive for existing applications and add them to the Program Manager. Many of these were DOS applications that had no embedded icon resources. To keep them from all being default applications, they used this little DLL database of icons.
Narishma
The 'why' was answered in the first article of this series.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20250505-00/?p=11...
indymike
Microsoft wanted to make their new GUI shell for dos look good. There were no apps with icons so they put the most popular and some good stand ins so their new GUI file manager/launcher worked well.
xunil2ycom
Having worked at WordPerfect during the days of Windows 3.0/3.1, I'm surprised they accommodated WP with icons.
pavlov
Roman numerals in software versioning should make a comeback.
The Cicero-approved desktop of MS-DOS programs from this moricons.dll set would include these:
Applause II 1.5
Framework III
Crosstalk-XVI 3.71
PC Paintbrush IV Plus
And of course you’d want dBase III+ and Deluxe Paint II Enhanced.
joemi
No thanks. Then it just causes confusion when some people use the roman numerals and other people convert them to arabic numerals. Especially for cases like Applause and Crosstalk mentioned above.
recursive
I didn't know these were intended for anything. I thought they were provided to users as a swiss-army knife of reasonably expressive icons for use however they saw fit.
At least that's how I used them.
I just can't get me enough of Raymond Chen and his wonderful walks down the dustier paths of memory lane. Feels like a more innocent time where I didn't feel like I was imminently going to be turned into paperclips.