File Manager is a

file manager A file manager or file browser is a computer program that provides a user interface to manage computer files, files and folder (computing), folders. The most common Computer file#Operations, operations performed on files or groups of files incl ...

program originally bundled with releases of

OS/2 OS/2 is a Proprietary software, proprietary computer operating system for x86 and PowerPC based personal computers. It was created and initially developed jointly by IBM and Microsoft, under the leadership of IBM software designer Ed Iacobucci, ...

and

Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

between 1988 and 2000. It is a single-instance graphical interface, replacing the command-line interface of

MS-DOS MS-DOS ( ; acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System, also known as Microsoft DOS) is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and a few op ...

to manage files (copy, move, open, delete, search, etc.) and MS-DOS Executive file manager from previous Windows versions. Although File Manager was included in

Windows 95 Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft and the first of its Windows 9x family of operating systems, released to manufacturing on July 14, 1995, and generally to retail on August 24, 1995. Windows 95 merged ...

and Windows NT 4.0 and some later versions, Windows Explorer was introduced and used as the primary file manager, with file management via a two-pane view different from that of File Manager, and a single-pane view obtained by clicking a "My Computer" icon. File Manager was reintroduced as an optional download for all modern releases of Windows (including

Windows 10 Windows 10 is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. The successor to Windows 8.1, it was Software release cycle#Release to manufacturing (RTM), released to manufacturing on July 15, 2015, and later to retail on July 2 ...

and later) on 6 April 2018.

Overview

The program's interface showed a list of directories on the left hand panel, and a list of the current directory's contents on the right hand panel. File Manager allowed a user to create, rename, move, print, copy, search for, and delete files and directories, as well as to set permissions ( attributes) such as archive, read-only, hidden or system, and to associate file types with programs. Also available were tools to label and format disks, manage folders for file sharing and to connect and disconnect from a network drive. On

Windows NT Windows NT is a Proprietary software, proprietary Graphical user interface, graphical operating system produced by Microsoft as part of its Windows product line, the first version of which, Windows NT 3.1, was released on July 27, 1993. Original ...

systems it was also possible to set ACLs on files and folders on

NTFS NT File System (NTFS) (commonly called ''New Technology File System'') is a proprietary journaling file system developed by Microsoft in the 1990s. It was developed to overcome scalability, security and other limitations with File Allocation Tabl ...

partitions through the shell32 security configuration dialog (also used by Explorer and other Windows file managers). On NTFS drives, individual files or entire folders could be compressed or expanded. The Windows NT version of File Manager allows users to change directory, file, local, network and user permissions. From Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0 onward, File Manager was superseded by Windows Explorer. However, the WINFILE.EXE program file was still included with Windows 95, 98 and

Windows Me Windows Me (Millennium Edition) is an operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of Microsoft Windows operating systems. It was the successor to Windows 98, and was released to manufacturing on June 19, 2000, and t ...

(16-bit executable), as well as Windows NT 4.0 (32-bit executable). The last 32-bit WINFILE.EXE build (4.0.1381.318) was distributed as part of Windows NT 4.0 Service Pack 6a (SP6a) in 1999, while the last 16-bit WINFILE.EXE build (4.90.3000) was distributed as part of Windows Me in 2000. Chris Guzak was the

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developer on the Windows 3.1 team responsible for File Manager. The source code was released on

GitHub GitHub () is a Proprietary software, proprietary developer platform that allows developers to create, store, manage, and share their code. It uses Git to provide distributed version control and GitHub itself provides access control, bug trackin ...

in 2018 with an

MIT license The MIT License is a permissive software license originating at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the late 1980s. As a permissive license, it puts very few restrictions on reuse and therefore has high license compatibility. Unl ...

by Microsoft. This coincided with the release of the new binaries of Windows File Manager compatible with Windows 10 around the same time (more information can be found below).

Versions

16-bit OS/2 and Windows 3.x

File Manager was introduced in OS/2 versions 1.1, 1.2 and 1.3, with the first version released in 1988 as part of OS/2 1.1. It was initially called "File System" in OS/2 1.1 and the name of the executable was called PMFILE.EXE (with "PM" in the file name standing for Presentation Manager, the GUI of OS/2 first introduced with version 1.1). The original version of File Manager was a 16-bit program that supported the 8.3 file names that were in use at the time. It did not support the extended file names that became available in Windows 95 – including long file names and file names containing spaces. Instead, it would display only the first six characters followed by a tilde character ("~") and a number, usually 1. More numbers (2, 3, and so on) were added after the tilde if more than one file name with the same initial characters existed in the same directory. The 16-bit version of File Manager was introduced into the Windows operating system starting with Windows 3.0 in 1990. The 16-bit version distributed with Windows 3.1 and Windows for Workgroups 3.1 installations had a Y2K issue due to lexicographic correlation between date representation and the

ASCII ASCII ( ), an acronym for American Standard Code for Information Interchange, is a character encoding standard for representing a particular set of 95 (English language focused) printable character, printable and 33 control character, control c ...

character set; colons and semicolons replaced what should have been '2000'. Microsoft issued corrected binaries for all Windows 3.1 environments in 1997.

Windows 9x

File Manager was superseded by Windows Explorer in all versions of Windows 9x starting with

, however File Manager itself continued to be included in Windows 9x releases such as Windows 95, 98, and Me. The program across all Windows 9x releases remained as a 16-bit program and was relatively unchanged from Windows 3.1.

Windows NT

File Manager was rewritten as a 32-bit program for Windows NT. This new version correctly handled long file names in addition to adding support for

file systems. It was included with Windows NT 3.1, 3.5, 3.51, and 4.0.

Windows 10 and later

On April 6, 2018, Microsoft released binaries and the

source code In computing, source code, or simply code or source, is a plain text computer program written in a programming language. A programmer writes the human readable source code to control the behavior of a computer. Since a computer, at base, only ...

, licensed under the

MIT License The MIT License is a permissive software license originating at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the late 1980s. As a permissive license, it puts very few restrictions on reuse and therefore has high license compatibility. Unl ...

, for an improved version of File Manager running on Windows 10. This version included changes such as the ability to compile in modern versions of Visual Studio, the ability to compile as a 64-bit application, and numerous usability improvements. Microsoft also released this app in the

Microsoft Store The Microsoft Store (formerly known as the Windows Store) is a digital distribution platform operated by Microsoft. It was created as an app store for Windows 8 as the primary means of distributing Universal Windows Platform apps. With ...

for free in late January 2019, which is compatible with all modern releases of Windows including Windows 10 and later.

References

External links

*
Windows File Manager on Microsoft Store
{{Windows Components Discontinued Windows components File managers for Microsoft Windows Formerly proprietary software Free and open-source software Microsoft free software Software using the MIT license Windows components Windows-only free software 1990 software