Windows Vista: Background

Microsoft Windows Vista is the next step in evolution of the Windows NT family. This OS series was developing independently from the Windows 9x family and traces its origin a decade back to Windows NT 4.0, released on July 29, 1996. Earlier operating systems that belong to the third version of Windows NT aren’t interesting today.

Windows NT 4.0 proved to be a breakthrough in comparison with Windows 95 in terms of reliability and stability. This was largely achieved by hardware virtualization, i.e. by replacing direct hardware access with a system API that provided such access. As a result, the new OS was capable of working for a long time without failures and reboots which were too frequent with any Windows 9x machine. But notwithstanding the use of the Windows 9x interface, Windows NT 4.0 didn’t suit well for home use, mostly due to its poor compatibility with games and some other software.

This situation changed after the February 17, 2000, release of Windows 2000, but that OS, although free from the compatibility issues typical of Windows NT 4.0, was oriented at the corporate market; there was no version of it for a home user. Ordinary users, and PC gamers too, were supposed to use Windows 98 and, later on, Windows Me, which were both rather unreliable and capricious in comparison with Windows NT. Quite a lot of PC enthusiasts eventually transitioned to Windows 2000 Professional and are still using this OS even today when Windows XP is predominant on the OS market.

Windows XP was released on October 25, 2001, and made the Windows 9x architecture obsolete. Its Home Edition version was offered specially for home users and lacked certain features that were then only called for in the corporate sector, particularly support for multiple processors. In other words, for the first time in Windows NT history, an OS from that family was oriented at a home rather than a corporate user. As opposed to Windows 2000, Windows XP was more user-friendly, also because of its new graphical interface you should be familiar with. The NT architecture with additional mechanisms for system restoration and to avoid the so-called dll-hell made Windows XP the first consumer OS from Microsoft to be tolerant to incorrect user actions.

Windows XP eventually became the most widespread OS in the world and is in fact the single OS used on high-performance gaming platforms. However, the development of the successor to Windows XP was started in July 2001, even before the official release of XP. The project was originally named Longhorn and was expected to yield a new OS at the end of 2002 or in early 2003. That OS would take an intermediate position between Windows XP and Blackcomb, Microsoft’s next project.

Under the changing circumstances, however, the Blackcomb project was postponed far into the future whereas the Longhorn project was indeed started anew in 2004. They took the code of Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 as the basis for it whereas Longhorn builds earlier than 5000 had used the Windows XP code. Starting with build 5112 (Beta 1), released on July 27, 2005, the project changed its name from Longhorn to Windows Vista and the OS has acquired its main features. From that moment on, the development process was moving along the finish lane, so to say.

The Beta 2 version of the new OS (build 5384) was compiled on May 18, 2006, and it was made available for everyone who took part in the customer preview program on June 6. We’ve got this version of Windows Vista and will describe it in the next section.