Hacker Remix

What were the MS-DOS programs that the moricons.dll icons were intended for?

257 points by rbanffy 4 days ago | 136 comments

calrain 3 hours ago

I used these all the time when rolling out Windows 3.1 and 3.11 for thousands of computers back in the early 90's.

You would just pick any icon that seemed relevant, with a focus on not choosing the same icon for two different applications.

Computer GUI's were so new then that people didn't really care if the icon was 100% correct or not.

Sometimes for big applications I would draw up an icon and then use it, but mainly try to stay on moricons.dll or any dll's that came with the application that might contain icons.

kace91 33 minutes ago

I find it funny that I use adaptive icons on android (the ones that switch color according to the OS color scheme) and I override non adaptive app icons the exact same way.

Local public transport app? Choose something resembling a bus, train or similar. Banking app? Pile of money or bill or whatever. Just as long as two apps don’t end up with the same icon it’s all fine.

What is old is new I guess.

qingcharles 2 hours ago

This. You just needed something and we were starved for icons with the default install, so I would just dig around to find an icon that half-way matched what the application (never "app" then) was.

chuckadams 9 hours ago

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.

layer8 2 hours ago

It’s probably partially an illusion, but while everything wasn’t fine back then, it seemed that there was at least a vision of a positive self-determined computing future that could be achieved and that we were roughly on-track on. Nowadays it feels more of a fight to keep things not getting worse, most of the time.

bombcar 1 hour ago

Computers were so new for most people that they weren't really yet on the "critical path".

And when you got them working, they saved so much time that you had extra time laying around.

ryoshu 1 hour ago

Building value vs extracting value.

avidiax 9 hours ago

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.

6502nerdface 14 minutes ago

James Yeh, Ken Griffin's "first quant" and eventual co-CIO of Citadel, used to say, when annoyed by a junior who was overfitting to the backtest, "I don't let the computer boss me around! I tell the computer what to do!"

yongjik 4 hours ago

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 7 hours ago

> ...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 5 hours ago

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.

EvanAnderson 4 hours ago

> Our civilization desperately needs a way to modify modern microelectronics at home or at least in a well-equipped repair shop.

I'll take consumer protection regulation, at least in the short term.

I wish manufacturers were required to clearly inform consumers which products are sold versus rented, self-hostable versus tied to hosted services, or crippled from running Free software by firmware locks. That would allow a market for freedom-respecting products to actually develop to a reasonable size, and not just to be a fringe thing.

martin-t 4 hours ago

Not just commit contempt, we should punish them.

It used to be the case that people valued freedom and the lack of it was something blatantly apparent.

When somebody was a slave, it was a very explicit interpersonal relationship which was very obviously abusive. Even today, some cultures such as Americans are so ashamed of their slaver past that they censor the word on YouTube.

When somebody worked for a company which compensated him not with money but company script which could only be exchanged for goods in company stores, it obviously created a relationship of unequal power which over time put the weaker side at an even bigger and bigger disadvantage. People were able to see and understand this and it was outlawed.

But these days, the power dynamics are so complex and have so many steps and intermediaries, people don't even know what is being taken away from them. It's a salami slicing attack too. There are minor outrages here and there but nothing even changes, two steps forward, one step back to appease them.

---

Bottom line: if a company claims it "sells" you something, the precedent is you own it fully. If you don't, that's theft. Theft, even multi step theft, should be punished in full. That means the company should pay a fine according to how much money they made from their abuse of power, multiplied by a punitive constant.

Additionally, all people involved in the decision making process should also be punished according to how much they stole.

bigfatkitten 2 hours ago

> 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).

Not if you’re a mainframe customer. Capacity based licensing has been a standard practice in the mainframe world for around 50 years.

Terr_ 5 hours ago

"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 6 hours ago

Before the before times, there are claims that IBM os360 would be delivered purposely handicapped until you paid the extra fees for the upgrade

deadbabe 7 hours ago

The greatest trick machines ever pulled was making us believe they haven’t done anything to us.

JadeNB 6 hours ago

> 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 8 hours ago

I love his posts. Read every one of them.

omnibrain 11 hours ago

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 8 hours ago

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 6 hours ago

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 12 hours ago

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 11 hours ago

> 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 8 hours ago

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 7 hours ago

I continue to run Turbo Pascal on a Z80-based machine, with 64k of RAM. A pentium would be luxury!

mattl 4 hours ago

Amstrad CPC or Tatung Einstein?

(Hi Steve!)

charlieyu1 7 hours ago

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

layer8 2 hours ago

This reminds me of the story of an office clerk who after using Excel for a year or two was amazed to learn that it could do calculations and wasn’t just a “tables” program.

90s_dev 11 hours ago

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 7 hours ago

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 10 hours ago

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?

pram 9 hours ago

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 7 hours ago

VB came around 9 years later.

layer8 1 hour ago

The first versions of both Visual Basic and Borland C++ were released in 1991. Turbo C 1.0 was in 1987. Maybe you are thinking of Turbo Pascal 1.0, released in late 1983, but I’d argue that one wasn’t confusing, if you were in the business of using early DOS at all.

rzzzt 6 hours ago

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.)

jbverschoor 11 hours ago

Man qbasic and borland C were great on DOS