All pictures would be collated in a pictures library, all music in music etc.

WinFS is the textbook example of this: A relational file system based on metadata, with the goal of evolving beyond file management to a world where all you needed to know was what type of thing you wanted. Many of the most ambitious features were either dropped to the cutting room floor, or given to smaller teams to die a slow death over the next few years – it’s also worth noting that a lot of the things there were building had already been tried in the mid-90s in the Cairo project, which also ended with a whimper (although it did inspire the Windows 95 UI). In 2004, they were still releasing alpha builds to developers, and shortly after the WinHEC conference where they handed out the most well known build 4074 the project was reset, the code dismantled and what was working reused and worked in to what eventually became Vista. It was supposed to RTM and see release in 2003, but missed that date badly. Intended to be the successor to Windows XP, the project grew from a minor update (Longhorn is a bar between the Whistler (XP codename) and Blackcomb (post-Longhorn-Windows codename) ski slopes) to an enormous project which wanted to rewrite almost everything, envisioning a highly connected future where the power of modern hardware could be used to its full advantage. Really then, Longhorn is sort of at the root of everything that is “me”, and so I still keep mountains of discs containing all the leaked builds and all the tools to make them run.īut let’s backtrack a tad: I should quickly explain Longhorn for the uninitiated. This project really accompanied my first experiences with an online community and led to numerous friendships that I still maintain almost ten years on, as well as exposing me to programming. Nostalgia is awesome sometimes, and for me nothing is more fondly remembered than the Longhorn project from the early ’00s.

Windows longhorn 4093 wallpaper