Longhorn concept
Arkmage21 HN recommender · recommended in 1 month, 2009–2019
demo · general · 2009–2019 on HN
A concept video from 2003 showing an early vision of Windows Longhorn's interface, before it shipped as Vista.
Cited to contrast Microsoft's ambitious Longhorn vision with the Vista that actually shipped.
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3 comments from Hacker News
Longhorn concept was awesome. I remember how crazy and advanced this Longhorn promo was ▶ this video >Sadly, we all know how Vista turned out at the end. Maybe with the first versions, but after a few service packs it was really usable. Hell, Windows 7 was referred to as "Windows Vista SP3" :) But I do agree that Vista wasn't as Longhorn. I think they realized it was too demanding and too advanced so they decided to milk the concept ideas for later versions.
I'm too young for Cairo, but I do remember Longhorn and WinFS, and indeed the marketing and ideas of those have shaped my view of what the systems could/should be today. Didn't BeOS also have some sort of object-database-filesystem-thingy? I remember some chatter about that, but didn't actually catch any first-hand experience at the time. edit: Longhorn concept video: ▶ this video
As a nice example, compare this ( ▶ this video ) to what shipped as Vista. And with Courier they are not even pretending it's a real shippable product.