Microsoft's ancient icon library still lurks deep within Windows 11

Pixels of the past 'created just for fun'

The pifmgr.dll still lingers in modern Windows installations - a throwback to a simpler and blockier time, according to veteran Microsoft engineer Raymond Chen.

As with the icons found in moricons.dll and progman.exe, pifmgr.dll contains a set of icons designed in an era when color and pixels were considerably more limited than the artistic endeavors of today. This author remembers squinting at a 16 x 16 grid to create something the user might recognize, using just 16 colors.

Microsoft filled pifmgr.dll with a selection of icons that a user might find handy to represent an MS-DOS application on the Windows desktop.

"The pifmgr.dll file was added in Windows 95," explained Chen. "Its job was, as the name might suggest, to manage PIF files, which are Program Information Files that describe how to set up a virtual MS-DOS session for running a specific application."

Whereas the icons in progman.exe and moricons.dll were created with specific applications or categories in mind, what was in pifmgr.dll was a bit of fluff.

"The icons in pifmgr.dll were created just for fun," he said. "They were not created with any particular programs in mind, with one obvious exception. They were just a fun mix of icons for people to use for their homemade shortcut files."

Or perhaps the Microsoft team that came up with them all those decades ago had glimpsed the future and wanted to use pifmgr.dll to warn future generations. There is, for example, a window through which clouds can be seen – a reference to Azure for sure. Then there is an image of a cloud with lightning – surely a warning about this week's catastrophic AWS outage. There's also a play block on which the letters A and I are seen (OK, it's probably A and the number 1, but let's not quibble about details).

And finally, there's an apple with a bite taken out of the left side instead of the right side of Apple's famous logo. Chen speculated: "Coincidence? Tip of the hat? Subtle jab? You decide."

The icons are chock full of '90s whimsy, and pifmgr.dll is still found in Windows 11, although at 36 kilobytes it also speaks of a time when things were not quite as bloated as they are today. ®