Hacker News Reader

Comment by qingcharles | Hacker News Reader

What is the official name of this minimal Windows 3 system? I know it used to have a name. It was used for other purposes too, but I can't for the life of me remember what.

View on HN

It was used when you wanted to compress the system drive (C:) with DriveSpace. it would reboot into something that looked like Windows 3.1 and do the compression. Just a single window with a progress bar and a cancel button, but the button and the title bar gave it away. I'm assuming it was loaded entirely into ram so it could safely meddle with the system partition. I always wondered if there was a way to boot into a working 3.1 environment as that stuff had to live somewhere in your install.

There's an INI file that contained a line like "SHELL=explorer.exe", if you changed that to "SHELL=progman.exe" it would boot up looking like Windows 3.1, and it worked at least as late as Win98. I had to use it once when something with Explorer got corrupted.

I remember until win98, you could run a program called fileman or something that looked like a win3.1 file browser. That was my idea of retro back then..

Ask and ye shall receive: https://github.com/Microsoft/winfile

File Manager, or winfile.exe, was the predecessor to Explorer's file management aspects. You can use it on Windows 10 and 11 (and all the others) if you want to.

Program Manager, or progman.exe, was the predecessor shell to Explorer. It was included with Windows through Windows XP SP1 before finally being stubbed in SP2 and removed altogether in Vista. You can probably grab the binary from XP SP1 and run it in newer Windows versions, though.

Might have to see if it works on wine. The screenshot has the horrible aero window frame though.

It's a multiple documents interface program (where one main window contains subwindows), a UI style out of fashion since the early days of Windows 95 (IIRC it was Office 97 that switched Office apps from MDI to multiple main windows for example). For some reason Microsoft hasn't updated the theming for them since Windows Vista, probably because it's such a niche thing. Even on Vista / 7, they're stuck as Aero Basic windows, rather than the actually glass ones. The Windows Forms editor in Visual Studio also using those window borders, which shows how much MS cares about that compared to XAML dialect of the week.

The Aero Basic theme is particularly horrible though, I do wonder if that particularly unpleasant shade of cyan for the borders was picked to punish those who didn't activate Windows, or were to poor to afford Home Premium.

In the end it's one of those weird forgotten things, like the Windows 3.x colour picker dialogue that still lurks in a few places like Wordpad (although MS are "solving" that).

So I think the WinForms editor thing occurs because of how windows are drawn rather than something related to Visual Studio itself. (You could see this more easily on Windows XP or whatever where if you decided to change from Luna to Olive or what have you, the WinForms designer form would change as well.)

I think it's probably an artifact of drawing the window in a particular way using the Win32 API.

For example, you can also see the "Aero Basic" style if you do a Control.DrawToBitmap on a Form control. (According to the winforms source, `DrawToBitmap` just sends a WM_PRINT message.)

I am actually mildly surprised it didn't change in Windows 10, but maybe that part of the codebase never got updated. Who knows :)

(Side note: there's also this article[1] from 2004 that describes creating your own custom "designer" type application. It's pretty old, but it might be interesting nontheless.)

[1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/archive/msdn-magazine/2004...

Supporting your point: if you set Form.TopLevel to false and then add the form as a control to another form, it'll be drawn in the "Aero Basic" style there, too.

Pretty sure you have Windows Preinstallation Environment, WinPE in mind but it arrived with XP - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Preinstallation_Enviro...

On Windows 200 and XP you could install additional recovery console - which in later version has become a default addition to the system

Ah, this was what I was thinking of, thank you. WinPE.

BetaWiki claims it's based on Modular Windows[1], as also used on the infamous Tandy VIS. Haven't a clue if it's true, and Modular Windows was used for basically nothing, MS seemed to just give up and move onto embedded version of NT fairly quickly.

[1] https://betawiki.net/wiki/Modular_Windows

Are you thinking of the Windows 3.00 Working Model?

https://betawiki.net/wiki/Windows_3.00_Working_Model

I'd not seen that one before, but I could have done with that version on my twin floppy 286 as it was a pain to run 3.1 on it.

Seems to be "Mini.cab"? Don't know if there are any other names for it.

There was a sort of PE called MiniNT I think that was a dos like Windows NT but I don't recall if it was used for any setup of Windows as it's been a few decades. Ouch that hurt to write.

Is that like the recovery console of Windows 2000/XP? Not Windows PE GUI with a command prompt window, but a fullscreen text-mode environment.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com