Cairo (operating system)

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Cairo was the code name for a project at Microsoft from 1991 to 1996. Its charter was to build technologies for a next generation operating system that would fulfill Bill Gates' vision of "information at your fingertips."

Contents 1 Overview 2 Features 3 See also 4 References

[edit] Overview

Cairo was announced at the 1991 Microsoft Professional Developers Conference by Jim Allchin.^[1] It was demonstrated publicly (including a demo system for all attendees to use) at the 1993 Cairo/Win95 PDC.^[2] Microsoft changed stance on Cairo several times, sometimes calling it a product, other times referring to it as a collection of technologies.^[3]

At its peak, Cairo was one of the largest groups at Microsoft and employed a majority of the company's senior engineering and design talent.

[edit] Features

Cairo used distributed computing concepts to make information available instantly and seamlessly across a worldwide network of computers.

Although Cairo never emerged as a shipping product, the main features of the operating system were shipped as parts of other Microsoft operating systems.

The Windows 95 user interface was based on the initial design work that was done on the Cairo user interface^[4]. DCE/RPC shipped in Windows NT 3.1. X.500 shipped as part of Active Directory in Windows 2000. X.400 messaging shipped as part of Microsoft Exchange Server. Content Indexing is now a part of Internet Information Server and Windows Desktop Search.^[1]

The remaining component is the object file system, now called WinFS. It was originally planned as part of Windows Vista but development was cancelled in June 2006, with some of its technologies to be merged into other Microsoft products such as the next version of Microsoft SQL Server "codenamed" Katmai.^[5]

[edit] See also

• History of Microsoft Windows
• Microsoft codenames

[edit] References

• Alan Deutschman (December 28, 1992). BILL GATES' NEXT CHALLENGE His aim: to lead the information revolution of the 1990s. That will land Microsoft, already the envy of its rivals, in a vast new competitive free-for-all.. Fortune. Retrieved on 2006-01-07.
• Nicholas Petreley (2002-04-08). The Road to Cairo. Computerworld. Retrieved on 2007-01-06.
• Andrew Orlowski (2006-06-19). Microsoft's Cairo reborn as killer eye-candy. The Register. Retrieved on 2007-01-06.