Microsoft is an interesting company. It is a company whose omnipresence shapes the perception of its products. By the end of the 1990s, Microsoft’s products had become part of the landscape of life. Any change to any product would stir overreaction whether it be positive or negative, and some time later, that same product would just be quotidian, and the next release would be the problem of the world or the cure to all ills. The previous release would then be the single most loved and cherished thing to have ever existed.
This presented a rather serious issue for Microsoft. As the company in charge of the world’s computer operating system, office suite, web browser, media player, and encyclopedia, they could make no changes without upsetting people. This was especially bad given that the foundation upon which Microsoft had built all of this was something they didn’t really like. Nearly from inception, Microsoft wanted to kill MS-DOS and replace it with XENIX and XEDOS. This changed on the 10th of June in 1985 when Microsoft and IBM inked a joint development agreement for OS/2. This agreement died when Microsoft’s Windows 3 saw success. IBM wanted rights to the OS, and BillG felt insulted. Gates’ strong reaction and refusal likewise stirred a sense of betrayal within IBM. With both parties feeling wronged, they worked out a deal for shared use of some technologies and promptly divorced.
To any outside observer, this would have appeared disastrous for Microsoft. Despite the rise of strong competition, IBM was still huge. It was one David Neil Cutler Sr who proved to be instrumental to Microsoft’s dilemma. Having recently worked on DEC’s VMS, he was precisely the kind of engineer who could get Microsoft out of MS-DOS entirely and provide an operating system well suited to a more technologically complicated environment. What he and his team created was Windows NT. The new operating system had VDMs (virtual DOS machines) for MS-DOS compatibility (x86 only), and it had personalities that would allow some compatibility for both UNIX and OS/2. With the arrival of NT, OS/2 was an IBM affair. While Microsoft continued supporting office applications and some other software for OS/2, the future for Microsoft was NT.
The killing of all MS-DOS legacy and the consumer Windows operating systems that booted off of it, was originally supposed to have been Windows 2000. The cancellation of this plan was announced on the 7th of April in 1999.
Neptune login screen, image from Microsoft and Wikipedia user Rezonansowy
Neptune Start Page
Neptune, Help and Support, Submitting a bug
The path to unification wasn’t clean. The original project for a consumer release of NT was called Neptune, and it was focused on a major redesign of the user interface. The thought was to create something task-oriented where a user would be presented with pages focused on a single thing. These pages, a UI codenamed Forms+, were implemented using the Mars framework which allowed the combination of HTML/JS with Win32, and there was even hope that a user wouldn’t need to manually save anything. Microsoft had a full roadmap for Neptune (or NepTune) that included a total of five service pack updates. There were also variants of Neptune planned such as Triton scheduled for spring of 2002. Triton was intended to be the first consumer operating system from Microsoft for the Intel Itanium as this was intended to be a home server release. Ultimately, only a single build of Neptune was ever released to testers, and that build lacked the interface that Microsoft had been planning. Visually, it was very much a Windows 2000 system, and it reported itself as such in System Properties. It did, unlike Windows 2000, have account types of Owner, Adult, Child, and Guest. The login screen and start page were the unique bits.
Start Screen concept, credited to Ben Slivka by NTDEV
Start Screen concept, credited to Ben Slivka by NTDEV
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