MS are the kings of legacy support, no joke here. It is astonishing really.

CARDFILE.EXE has been long gone though.

Ah man I totally forgot about this!

From Wikipedia: "The Windows 3.1 version of Cardfile was included with Windows 95, 98, and ME, but not installed by default. For the later two versions of Windows, the user would have to manually copy the Cardfile application from the Windows install CD in order to use the application."

This is their strongest point. I still remember being able to install Microsoft Money 99 on a brand new Windows 10 for my uncle, without much difficulties.

pbrush also opens Microsoft Paint. (It used to be called Paintbrush.)

> > Typing 'write' in the Run dialog still opens WordPad today

> pbrush also opens Microsoft Paint.

And in both cases, the reason was most probably backwards compatibility, so that programs which directly called WRITE.EXE or PBRUSH.EXE to open a file would keep working. Most of these are going to be 16-bit Windows programs (which AFAIK no longer work, unless you're still running a 32-bit build of Windows), or 32-bit Windows programs directly ported from 16-bit Windows programs (Microsoft designed the 32-bit Windows API to make it easy to have a single source code building both 16-bit and 32-bit versions of the same program, and to make it easy to adapt the source code from a 16-bit Windows program into a 32-bit Windows program; it was not unusual back then to offer both 16-bit and 32-bit builds of the same program, built from the same source code).

Cool exe's don't change

Ever. So cool.

You can use otvdm to run 16-bit Windows applications directly under modern Windows. It emulates the CPU and translates all the Win32 API calls.

I wish sol.exe still opened up Solitaire. The original one.

can i do something in regedit so that "paint" loads up "paint.net" and not og paint?

The binary for Microsoft Paint is called mspaint.exe, and there is no "paint" alias AFAICT -- typing "paint" in the run prompt results in "Windows cannot find 'paint'".

You could create a paint.bat file in C:\Windows\System32 (usually the first dir in %PATH%) that calls Paint.net instead. Something like this should work:

    "C:\Program Files\paint.net\paintdotnet.exe" %*

Add entry to. Works atleast in Win 11

   Computer\HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\App Paths

I don't have a reference for this but I remember reading that Microsoft had to create Wordpad from scratch because they lost the code for Write. I do remember that when they introduced Wordpad it was missing several features present in Write and a very visible one was justified text.

According to Murray Sargent's blog post on RichEdit version history, justified text was added to RichEdit in v3.0. The Win10 version of WordPad seems to support fully-justified text per paragraph.

see https://web.archive.org/web/20070306114503/http://blogs.msdn...

Write had an interesting cursor with the vertical pipe line and something like an asterisk. I used it for a while on Windows 3.1 before someone set me up with a copy of MS Office 4.3.