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Vista vs. Cairo - A Microsoft History Lesson

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the something-to-read dept.

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."

6 of 194 comments (clear)

  1. Infamous indeed - spammer by mccalli · · Score: 5, Informative

    Daniel Eran has been spamming uk.comp.sys.mac for weeks now, ignoring every polite request for him to stop. He shows no sign of engaging with the group (beyond calling us "a hateful bunch of queens"), just spams links to his blog against charter and then swans off again.

    Daniel Eran. Just Say No.

    Cheers,
    Ian

  2. Better Windows history here... by Aphrika · · Score: 5, Informative

    Wikipedia - generally a little more authoritative than a (rather opinionated and flawed) blog entry.

    Incidentally, I distinctly remember Cairo not being vaporware or a hoax as stated in the article, there were certainly dodgy builds of it floating around before it was canned and NT 4.0 appeared as a Win95-ified NT 3.51 replacement. The idea that Cairo was a hoax in a non-starter. That's like saying Copland was a hoax, no, sometimes projects get shelved because they're not working out - OS design is an area of computing where it's incredibly easy to be idealogical about features, then figure out that you just can't deliver the goods.

  3. Very Nice Link... by bigdavesmith · · Score: 5, Funny

    The Borg Cube bearing the Microsoft logo, destroying Earth, with flames reaching up from off-frame image just screams professionalism. I will take anything this site says very seriously.

  4. Re:Ok, I'll bite. by johnw · · Score: 5, Insightful

    What did Windows 95 actually add? W95 actually followed on from W3.1 rather than W3.0. The main feature which it added (and the thing which drove Microsoft to release it) was incompatibility with OS/2. Because IBM had licensed access to the W3.1 source they were able to achieve first-rate compatibility for OS/2 running W3.1 programs, plus much better stability, multi-tasking etc. A crashing W3.1 program running on OS/2 simply took itself out rather than the whole system. Microsoft saw themselves potentially losing market share in a big way, so rushed W95 out.

    This has always been the way with Microsoft. They'll happily deny there's anything wrong with a product, no matter how much evidence exists that there is. The *only* thing that will move them to act is the prospect of losing market share to a better product.
  5. Re:NT by diegocgteleline.es · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  6. Re:Cairo vs NT/Cairo by 6Yankee · · Score: 5, Funny

    Even more confusing when you read it as "Vista vs. Casio", and look forward to a story about a digital watch being forced to run Vista and bursting into flames :(