Windows Explorer Through the Years
The article says that Windows 95 file explorer is not that deeply altered from File Manager. While this might be somewhat true in visual sense, it is completely different beast in what it does.<p>File Manager was just what it says on the tin and showed directories and files, while Explorer displays what is essentially an arbitrary graph of COM objects and allows you to call methods on them. One particularly notable point about that is that it is not that MS renamed directories to folders in Windows 95, these are names for two slightly different concepts. Directories are on filesystem, while folder is essentially anything that can be shown as explorer window (including desktop, control panel, various synthesized views of start menu contents, &quot;god-mode menu&quot;...).