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Comment by twoodfin | Hacker News Reader

“Object Packager”! I’d spend hours trying to figure out what you could do with a utility sporting such a cool name & icon.

Did anyone ever use it for its mysterious but intended purpose?

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It wrapped media objects into compatible OLE 1.0 objects for insertion into OLE containers (example: office documents, presentations etc). It was a component of OLE before later versions and before OLE became ActiveX, and learned to embed stuff by themselves. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object_Linking_and_Embedding#O...

It's weird to think how big a part of desktop computing this once was, and now there's no real expectation for it. Web content's also not particularly embeddable. I used to love KParts in KDE - I'd start the morning with Konqueror open with some tabs showing web pages, some tabs showing my Excel time sheet or the Word docs with specs for what I was working on, and it was just totally normal that all this stuff worked and composed together.

IIRC - fuzzy old memories, but I think you could use it with OLE to combine a few different embedded OLE sources into one document, e.g. a Microsoft Draw vector piece and a Media Player MID into one component that could be embedded elsewhere.

Very useless. Most Win 3.1 machines with 1-4MB RAM could barely even start MS Draw without churning swap like they were trying to make butter....

I did. It wasn't very cool after all. I know what you mean about the icon, too. And why wasn't it easier to get that kind of cool custom icon for one's favorite, and still current, MS-DOS apps at that time? Frustrating.

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