The pifmgr.dll still lingers in modern Windows installations - a throwback to a simpler and blockier time, according to veteran Microsoft engineer Raymond Chen.

As with the icons found in moricons.dll and progman.exe, pifmgr.dll contains a set of icons designed in an era when color and pixels were considerably more limited than the artistic endeavors of today. This author remembers squinting at a 16 x 16 grid to create something the user might recognize, using just 16 colors.

Microsoft filled pifmgr.dll with a selection of icons that a user might find handy to represent an MS-DOS application on the Windows desktop.