Much of Windows is cobbled together from parts from the past. There are decades-old Windows tools that are still useful today, menus that haven’t changed since Windows 7, and choices all over the OS that reflect Windows’ focus on backward compatibility.
If you look closely enough, you’ll also find traces of decades-old technology in Windows 11. These have no practical use today, but are fun to explore and enjoy a nostalgia trip with.
Dial-up internet
Once you’re connected via Wi-Fi or Ethernet, you likely don’t visit the internet settings in Windows 11 often unless you have a problem. You thus might have missed the Dial-up option under Settings > Network & internet, right alongside the modern options like VPN and Mobile hotspot.
That’s right—Windows 11 supports the old-school internet connection technology that everyone who had a computer in the 1990s will remember. Clicking Set up a new connection opens the old Control Panel box, which still has a Dial-up option.
When I try this, Windows tells me it can’t detect a modem. While you can get USB modems on Amazon, you’ll also need a service provider to connect to. This year, the legendary AOL ended its dial-up service, which began in 1991. There are three main options remaining:
Dial-up is capped at 56Kbps, which is painfully slow by today’s standards. A download speed calculator helps you compare how long it would take to download a file at various speeds. A 1GB file would take over 40 hours to download on dial-up!
Floppy disks
Floppy disks have long been out of the public mind—aside from acting as the “save” icon in many programs. Like dial-up, though you almost certainly have no reason to use them today, Windows 11 can still handle floppy disks.
No Windows 11 PC has a floppy disk slot built-in, so you’ll again have to turn to external solutions. This floppy disk reader is under $20, making it worth a try if you want to engage in a historical experiment. If you don’t have any old floppy disks to try, floppydisk.com sells recycled ones.
Another remnant of this support hides in File Explorer: the reason your OS drive is disk C is that the earliest versions of Windows reserved A and B for the two floppy disk slots. In the name of backward compatibility, this continued long after anyone stopped caring about floppy disks.
Windows 95 compatibility mode
Windows compatibility modes help you run old programs that worked on previous versions of the OS but have trouble with newer versions.
When you enable these modes, Windows reports false info to the program to trick it into working. It might tell the program it’s running on an older version, point to certain folders that have changed names on modern Windows versions, or similar.
While this won’t work for all software, it’s an easy fix that’s worth a try when old programs won’t work on your system. Apply it by right-clicking a program’s executable then going to Properties > Compatibility and checking Run this program in compatibility mode for.
There, you’ll see every major version of Windows prior to the one you’re using (aside from Windows 10, since its architecture is so similar to Windows 11). The oldest one is Windows 95; hopefully you don’t need to run any software from 30 years ago!
Analog faxing
I haven’t thought about sending a fax in many years, and you likely haven’t either. However, Windows 11 still includes a utility called Windows Fax and Scan, which made its debut in Windows Vista. The version in Windows 11 retains the look of Windows programs from that era.
Windows Fax and Scan is not a digital faxing service that lets you send and receive faxes online. Instead, this utility is for analog faxes, meaning you need a modem to connect a phone line to your computer (like with dial-up). Given this awkward requirement, I’d imagine businesses prefer physical fax machines or electronic faxes.
While faxing isn’t something most individuals worry about now, it’s still important in many sectors of business since laws explicitly list it as a secure communication method. Hospitals and other medical offices use it to transmit protected health information, plus it provides a clear paper trail with timestamps, which is important for legal purposes.
Assuming you don’t care about analog faxing, this Windows utility can still be useful for scanning documents into your computer. Though you can also use the app provided by your scanner manufacturer, or use apps to scan documents on your phone.
Phone Dialer
A piece of Windows 95 lurks on every Windows 11 system, near-unchanged from its initial release. By opening the Run panel (Win + R) and entering dialer.exe, you’ll launch the Phone Dialer tool.
Continuing with our theme of modem-based features, this is an ancient app that let you make phone calls using your PC back when nearly every PC was connected to a modem. When you try to use it now, you get a warning that there’s no modem connected.
Unlike dial-up and faxing, this feature required a modem that handled both voice and data. Most dial-up modems were only for data, so you’d either need a different piece of equipment or had to pick up a phone in your home after dialing.
Nowadays, you can make calls from your computer using the Phone Link feature or with chat apps. We’ve come a long way from this museum exhibit.
Windows 3.1 dialog boxes
The historical finds in Windows 11 go back further than Windows 95. The little-known administrative utility ODBC Data Sources contains a Windows 3.1-style File Explorer dialog box!
To see it for yourself, open the Control Panel by searching for it in the Start menu, then change View by at the top-right to Small icons (if it’s not already). Choose Windows Tools from the list, then select ODBC Data Sources (either 32- or 64-bit is fine).
On the resulting User DSN tab, click Excel Files in the box, then Add on the right. In the next window, click Microsoft Access Driver, then Finish.
Finally, under Database in the window that appears, click Select. This opens a prompt to select a file that uses the Windows 3.1 dialog box, complete with retro folder icons.
As you’d expect, that box is clunky compared to the modern file selector. There’s no reason to visit this old tool for connecting to databases, other than seeing this bit of history.
MS-DOS icons
Our final entry is also the oldest. If your folders are in need of new icons, why not apply an MS-DOS look?
Right-click on any file or folder, choose Properties, then on the Customize tab, click the Change Icon button. In the resulting panel, enter “moricons.dll” in the Look for icons in this file box and hit Enter.
Doing this loads a set of icons from Windows 3.0, first released in 1990. Since early Windows versions were a graphical shell on top of MS-DOS, these icons were used to represent common DOS programs. The limited colors and pixelated visuals bring a retro charm, though these icons are messy by today’s standards.
Windows’ extreme backward compatibility is both a strength and a limitation. Amazingly, features released 30+ years ago continue to work in Windows 11, even if few people need them. Though this heavy backward support also makes the OS feel less cohesive, with all kinds of different themes and visual styles.
There are bits of previous Windows versions all over Windows 11, with many of them going back decades. It’s fun to take a tour through history on your own machine.