That’s not a typo. Windows 96 promised to build on the success of Windows 95, yet it never materialized as originally intended.
I only learned about this a few months ago. To me, this was an incredibly fascinating discovery and wanted to write about & share it.
I was actually part of the beta test group for Windows Nashville. It was an improvement over Windows 95, but Windows 98 really brought home a lot of good UI design improvements that began in Windows Nashville. Sadly, it was so buggy that they delayed for several years and, instead, just released Windows 98 when it was finally ready.
Windows Longhorn was a similar failure a few years later
Windows Vista is Microsoft’s greatest success, because it’s main purpose was to make people forget the promises made for Longhorn.
I do kinda wish we had gotten WinFS. All the “ideas” of it seemed cool, just impossible to implement without breaking every existing application.
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FS?
As in “F’ing Shit”?
Future Storage aka WinFS. It was a cool idea, metadata based relational db file system. But the execution was horrible, SQL Server based file system which was exposed via .NET IIRC.
Desktop search was supposed to be revolutionized, but it was scrapped just before Vista was released
If I recall, it was a new file system. So instead if folders, every file would just kind of have tags and could be dynamically grouped like that. I could very well be wrong, but I remember being excited for it.
Can we please have a FUSE FS like this?
I was curious, so I found this: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3263036/file-system-that-uses-tags-rather-than-folders
One of the projects they mention is tagfs, which sounds like it does what you want: http://github.com/marook/tagfs
Ha, thanks for searching!
Longhorn… the hype was strong with that one. I don’t even remember what the hype was about, just that Longhorn was supposed to be amazing.
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Wow, that’s a cool story! Thanks for sharing it! I had no clue there was even a beta test group back then. Was that outside of Microsoft?
No, I actually worked for Microsoft. I was 15. It was a sort of contract gig for bug hunters, especially if you were able to fix the code at all. Otherwise, you just had access to download it from Microsoft servers and submit feedback.
Back then, these betas were tested by the Microsoft user interface group, maybe that’s where I did contractor work for Longhorn. It was a very long time ago.
Oh, the name Longhorn unlocked some memories just now…