Welcome back, old friend

www.snipca.com/27516 What you need: Windows Vista, 7, 8/8.1 or 10

While the majority of Microsoft engineers are focused on creating new tools and products, at least one of the company’s employees – veteran development manager Craig Wittenberg – has been looking into Windows’ past. And the product of his labours is an open-source re-release of Windows 3.0’s File Manager – the first ever graphical file-management tool that Microsoft created, and the ancient (1990) ancestor of Windows 10’s File Explorer.

File Manager has been posted online for anyone to download and it works well on current PCS, even if it looks a little anachronistic running on a Windows 10 machine. There are actually two versions of File Manager available. The one we recommend you download is Winfile_v10.0.zip. This is Windows File Manager updated with a few enhancements that bring it in line with modern computers. For example, it supports Ctrl+c and Ctrl+v keyboard shortcuts for copying and pasting.

The other version – Winfile_orig_plus.zip – is the original Windows File Manager with only minimal changes made to convert it from 16bit to 32bit and 64bit. If you’re interested, the source code for both versions is available to download.

File Manager doesn’t need to be installed. Extract the ZIP file, then just double-click Winfile.exe to run the tool. File Manager requires Microsoft Visual Studio 2015 C++ Runtime in order to work – if you don’t already have this installed on your PC, you may see an error message when you first attempt to run the tool. You can download the required component for free from www.snipca.com/27517. 1 Remember the dual-pane view in Windows’ original file management tool? Click a folder in the file tree in the left-hand pane and the folder’s contents will be displayed in the righthand pane. 2 File Manager defaults to displaying your computer’s C: drive. To switch to a different drive, click the relevant drive button in the top left or select the other drive from the dropdown menu. 3 Don’t expect to see any thumbnail previews – these weren’t introduced until Microsoft’s Desktop Update added them to Windows Explorer in 1997. Instead all files and images are displayed by their icons. 4 In the top toolbar you’ll find useful options, such as a button that lets you open another explorer window within File Manager – great for moving and copying files from one directory to another.