On 16 Aug 2005 at 13:31, Brad Beyenhof wrote: > On 16/08/05, David W. Fenton <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > There is no real analog to Program Manager in Win95 and all later > > versions of Windows, which would perhaps make my Windows analog even > > more wrong than the Mac example. > > Well, none that is intended to be used, anyway. "progman.exe" still > exists in 9x version of Windows (and possibly Windows 2000, but not > XP), and you can run it the same way you used to in Win3.
I think it (and Winfile.exe) were included in Win95 (don't know about Win98 -- never ran it myself), but they were not recommended, because they were 16-bit programs and did not understand long filenames, if I'm remembering correctly. When I got my first Win95 PC, I was very disappointed with Windows Explorer in the beginning and tried using File Manager for a while, but once I started accumulating long file names, it became impossible to use. I eventually got used to the single hierarchy for your entire computer (even though I still think it's conceptually wrong, and the wrongness has been vastly increased in later versions of Windows Explorer). I note, also, that my Win2K PC has progman.exe on it, and it's clearly not an artifact of the upgrade from NT 4 (it's in both the original NT 4 Windows folder, over top of which I originally upgraded, and in the fresh Win2K folder that I later installed from scratch). I can't tell for sure by looking if it's a 32-bit app or not, but the dialogs definitely appear to be calling Win32 instead of Win16 APIs, based on appearance, and it understands long filenames. I'm not sure why it has been included all these years, except, perhaps to support legacy programs. I do know that most Win3.x programs do *not* create program manager groups, but instead standard Start Menu program groups, so I always assumed that Win16 had been altered to redirect old-style Win3.x program group creation commands to Windows Explorer instead of to whatever APIs created Program Manager groups. If that is the case, I'm not certain why Program Manager would be needed for backwards compatibility, except, I guess, to support legacy programs that somehow hardwired use of Program Manager. If I were Microsoft, that's the kind of legacy program I'd allow to fail, but, clearly, that isn't the kind of company Microsoft is in regards to providing backward compatibility. -- David W. Fenton http://www.bway.net/~dfenton David Fenton Associates http://www.bway.net/~dfassoc _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
