Microsoft Open Sources 27-Year-Old ‘File Manager’ — Run It On Windows 10

Nowadays, everyone has the computer at their home & workplace, if we talk about a desktop operating system, Microsoft Windows is the most used desktop operating system which is loved by many. Well, do you know Microsoft also has a File Manager app that was released with Windows 3.0?

Microsoft’s first File Manager (WinFile) was released with Windows 3.0 and it has now been open sourced. That means Microsoft’s first File Manager app (WinFile) is back again to give you nostalgia feelings.

Well, if we talk about WinFile, the file manager was the successor of the MS-DOS executive. The File manager was actually introduced as a new way to access files and folders in Windows operating system.

It’s worth to note that WinFile was shipped with Windows 3.0 till Windows NT 4.0 and Windows ME. Later, the WinFile was replaced by Windows Explorer (File Explorer) as a file manager.

The source code for WinFile is available on Github and is maintained by Microsoft veteran Craig Wittenberg under the MIT License. Craig Wittenberg copied the code from the Windows NT 4 source tree way back in 2007 and made some minor changes to make the file manager compatible with the current version of Windows operating system.

Well, the File manager can be compiled with Visual Studio and it also works on 64-bit Windows Operating system. You can download the Original and tweak File Manager versions and their source code from Microsoft’s Github repo.