Vista vs. Cairo - A Microsoft History Lesson

avocade writes "Here is a nice history lesson by (the unfortunately infamous) Daniel Eran, arguing why the Longhorn/Vista road is very similar to the NT/Cairo road that Microsoft took in the 90's, effectively trying their best to discourage competition in the marketplace."

Comments

NT

[DrSkwid]

NT stand for Nested Task, it's a register in the 286 that helps preepmtive multi-tasking which is the feature of both OS/2 and NT that distinguishes them from Window 3.x/9x that used co-operative multi-tasking.

http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2006/readings/i386 /s04_01.htm

4.1.1 Systems Flags
The systems flags of the EFLAGS register control I/O, maskable interrupts, debugging, task switching, and enabling of virtual 8086 execution in a protected, multitasking environment. These flags are highlighted in Figure 4-1 .

NT (Nested Task, bit 14)
        The processor uses the nested task flag to control chaining of interrupted and called tasks. NT influences the operation of the IRET instruction .

Re:NT

[MLopat]

NT as in Windows NT has always stood for "New Technology". In fact, the operating system at one time was simply going to be branded "NT" except that Northern Telecom (Nortel) had something to say about it.

Re:NT

[pla]

NT stand for Nested Task

Or, officially, "New Technology".

Or, the most likely of all, by analogy to IBM -> HAL (as in, HAL-9000 from the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey), VMS -> W(indows)NT. I would normally consider that a cute coincidence, if they didn't share Dave Cutler as a lead designer on both projects.

But given that he did help design both OSs, and the propensity for geeks to come up with bizarrely convoluted acronyms, I'd call that the "right" answer as to the origins of the name "NT".

Re:NT

[diegocgteleline.es]

Sight. This topic. Again.

Just check the Windows NT wikipedia page, which links at page, where you can find this quote from one of the original NT creators:

"We checked the first code pieces in around mid-December 1988," Lucovsky said, "and had a very basic system kind of booting on a simulator of the Intel i860 (which was codenamed "N-Ten") by January." In fact, this is where NT actually got its name, Lucovsky revealed, adding that the "new technology" moniker was added after the fact in a rare spurt of product marketing by the original NT team members. "Originally, we were targeting NT to the Intel i860, a RISC processor that was horribly behind schedule. Because we didn't have any i860 machines in-house to test on, we used an i860 simulator. That's why we called it NT, because it worked on the 'N-Ten.'"

So please, stop all those theories, the origins of the name are well documented.

Re:NT

[man_of_mr_e]

Actually, no. "New Technology" was actually the second name of the code name. It was originally derived from the first CPU they wrote NT for, the Intel N-Ten, which eventually became the i860 Risc CPU.

When they ported NT to x86, they changed the name to "new technology", then later claimed it didn't stand for anything anymore (because it's harder to trademark an acronym).

Re:How else do you get a message out?

[mccalli]

If an individual has a message they feel is important that they want to get out, I don't see an issue with posting a reference or two. Flooding a board is another story.

...and flooding is what's taking place. Yes, a post such as "here's a new and interesting Apple-related blog, please come and have a look" would have gone down fine. Instead we get every single article he writes for this blog being dumped as a rhetorical question into a group which specifically forbids advertising, and then he never engages in any discussion regarding it. The regulars of the group have all asked him to stop. He just totally disregards us.

Besides, using the term "SPAM" is inaccurate: what is the commercial benefit of his links?

Advertising revenue. He's abusing a community discussion group to take every opportunity to dump links to his advert revenue-driven blog. The group does not exist for his enrichment, as we say on there: uk.comp.sys.mac.adverts is thataway -->.

Cheers,
Ian

So?

[Robber Baron]

What Microsoft faces in 2007 is not going to be the lack of OEMs selling Vista for them, but the unraveling of its monopoly position and its ability to mislead the world again with promises of new, next generation technology just around the corner. We know better than that now. So? Tell us something we don't know.
Microsoft makes operating systems and office/productivity apps, and that's about it; nothing magical or "next generation" about that.
Don't expect "next generation" and you won't be disappointed.
BTW Linux is still staring at its own navel...

where are the feetures ..

[rs232]

Remember they were included in Cairo in some form in 1995. Vaporware as usually described, is announcing something that don't exist in the hope of warding off the opposition from entering the market and also with the full knowlege that such feetures are not implementable in a realistic timeframe. Else why haven't we seen the pre-announced features even now in late 2006.

"The top level will .. [be] the Cairo desktop itself .. Cairo's Object File System (OFS) makes the whole hard disk a single huge docfile that exposes its internal objects to the user"

"In Daytona's successor, Cairo, OLE structured storage will be able to attach to, and extend, the file system",

"Microsoft's future object-oriented file system for Windows NT (see the sidebar "A Peek at OFS"). Ultimately, we could be looking at a distributed file system based on this technology .. Almost all this technology is expected to converge in Cairo"

"Object File System Lets you create a pseudodirectory that unifies local, network, and Internet files"

http://www.dynamicobjects.com/d2r/archives/002430. html

was Re:Better Windows history here...

Re:Infamous indeed - spammer

[davecarlotub]

There are 15 messages from DanielEran in uk.comp.sys.mac since November 12th. They are indeed blog link posts, but hardly a FLOOD.

Re:EVERY enemy of MS's is Slashdot's friend

[DECS]

If something is factually wrong in the article, why don't you point it out?

Sounds like you are just dismissing anything that doesn't fit your narrow world view.

Re:Ok, I'll bite.

[Anonymous Coward]

No, the main thing it added was full 32-bit support with process separation, threading with preemptive multitasking, virtual memory as well as kernel isolation. It was a fairly major overhaul from the DOS kernel, although much of that overhaul was under the scenes and invisible to the end user. But the result was apparent. In Win3.x a program could enter a hard loop and bring the system down because Win3.x depended on the program yielding to the OS to permit other programs to run. In Win95 that was not possible. It was an excellent middle ground between where DOS/Win3.x was and where NT was going, permitting nearly 100% backward compatibility while stabilizing the platform. It also made it abstract enough from the underlying kernel implementation to completely change the kernel out six years later with the NT kernel when good software practices made it possible to lock down the third ring, completely isolating processes from each other and the kernel, and hardware caught up reasonably enough to run the rest in emulation.

Re:Perfect Timing

[DECS]

NeXT offered the world an open standard for a graphical Unix powered by object oriented frameworks called OpenStep.

Sun and HP signed up to deliver OpenStep compliant, interoperable implementations for their operating sytems (Solaris and HP/UX) and GNU started work on GNUStep.

The competition was Cairo (Microsoft's vaporware that never materialized) and Taligent (IBM & Apple's vaporware that never materialized).

Despite being futuristic technology, open, and free, it was dumped upon by its own backers. Sun dumped NeXT for Java hype, and HP joined Taligent just prior to its failing, leaving a void that Microsoft could fill with nothing special.

Apple bought NeXT and repurposed its technology to build Mac OS X. Nobody says much about Taligent or JavaStations anymore, and Vista is struggling to look like Mac OS X. I guess you could say the whole desktop world fumbled the ball, and Apple happened to be in the right place at the right time to grab the ball and run with it.

The Secrets of Pink, Taligent, Copland (and OpenStep)

Re:Ok, I'll bite.

[Bert64]

Your thinking of win32s...
Ofcourse, the win32 API came first in NT3, win32s was the port of it to dos-based windows... Windows 95 was basically 3.11 with win32s bundled in, a new interface and a few other things bundled in by default. And it came bundled with dos instead of having to install it seperately.
They both still had dos underneath, tho 95 started windows by default whereas 3.1 didn't.

Credibility is Questionable

[PixieDust]

From just these two statements:

Windows 3.0 gets polished and becomes Windows 95? hardly, as these two Operating Systems are vastly different, with their only real similarity being they both run on top of DOS.

Windows XP gets polished and becomes Windows Vista? Again, hardly, as again they are VERY different. XP And Vista are much closer than 3.1/95, but they're still worlds apart. Feature sets are very different, capabilities are very different, overall user experience is VASTLY different, and checking things out under the hood a lot has changed, and it's kind of interesting to see just how much. Yes a lot of features were unfortunately dropped, but there is still a lot here to chew on.

I saw earlier a comment saying the blogger is a spammer. Somehow, that wouldn't surprise me. It's an MS flame article though. Can we mod front page articles -1 flamebait? ;-)