moricons.dll, A Remnant Of Windows 3.1 Lives On To This Day

A 12KB Treasure Trove Of Memories

When Windows goes through a major upgrade Microsoft is more likely to hide legacy features and files that to actually get rid of them.  For instance, you may no longer see Disk Cleanup as a choice when you look at the properties of one of your drives, but search for it and you will find it immediately.  Such is the case with moricons.dll, a recent topic on Microsoft veteran Raymond Chen’s Old New Thing blog.  The name of the tiny file is very descriptive, it is literally a library of icons which was created when it was realized that they couldn’t just keep adding program icons to progman.exe.

Instead of fretting about current affairs this Friday, take a scroll down memory lane and recall when Turbo Pascal, WordPerfect, Lotus 123 and Sidekick 2 populated your desktop.  moricons.dll managed to survive the move from 32-bit to 64-bit and you can read a bit about it at The Register and keep an eye on the New Old  Things blog for a look at those old images, if you don’t want to open the DLL yourself.