Developer Recreates Windows 3.1 Program Manager in One Hour Using Claude Code

IT Home reported on September 10 that if you want a quick taste of the retro Windows experience on a Windows 11 or macOS device, this replica of the Windows 3.1 Program Manager, designed to recreate the classic vibe, might be just what you are looking for.

Developer Mayuki has introduced a neat little nostalgia project called ReProgman—a name derived from "progman.exe," the core system shell of Windows 3.1 from years past, which exited the stage of history thirty years ago when Windows 95 debuted.

ReProgman boasts remarkably high fidelity. In a social media post announcing ReProgman, Mayuki wrote: "I had Claude make a replica of the Windows 3.1 Program Manager," adding, "I think you can probably be nostalgic over it for about 30 seconds."

Claude Code generated this Windows 3.1 shell replica surprisingly fast. An initial version produced in just about an hour was "already quite good," though it still required some effort to polish the details and fix issues. Mayuki also joked that after actually using ReProgman for about half a minute, it would lose its novelty.

The release version aimed at general users is between 12 and 16 MB, making it effortless to download, and it runs immediately without installation. Whenever you want to try it out, browsing your current system's programs and files with a touch of nostalgia is completely hassle-free. Mayuki noted that compiling and running the program requires .NET SDK 10.0 or higher. The project's code has been published on GitHub under the MIT open-source license.

Overall, Mayuki's ReProgman delivers a lighthearted journey into personal computing nostalgia, taking you back to the Windows 3.x era of the early to mid-1990s. However, some argue that to truly experience the fun of retro computing, it is better to run an authentic MS-DOS / Windows 3.1 setup on real hardware. IT Home noted that in April of this year, a tech enthusiast successfully ran Windows 3.1X bare-metal on top-tier modern hardware equipped with a Ryzen 9 9900X processor and an RTX 5060 Ti graphics card.