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Comment by fcbrooklyn | Hacker News Reader

At the time there were two branches, the win 3.1 branch, which was consumery, and the NT branch which was for servers / developers, etc. Cairo was an OS based on the NT branch, which was ultimately cancelled. Chicago was the project name for win95, which came off the 3.1 branch. Eventually the NT/3.1 branches merged, in the release called XP. And yeah, there's no such thing as windows 93.

Source: worked at msft from 92-97.

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But I thought the Chicago UI was also present in some form in cairo, and that is where some of it originated. Is that true?

I know the history of NT based windows much better, I was at MS later, and in Windows.

There may have been some overlap, but as I remember it the main thrust of Cairo wasn't really about UI. It was an object based filesystem, and some other fancy shit going on under the covers. (I was on Apps, and we never targetted Cairo, never got a chance to play with it directly, but I saw it demoed a few times, and I remember the UI looking more like NT/3.11. Could easily be misremembering that part though)

EDIT: Yeah, you're right, there was some UI that made it to 95. From wikipedia:

"The Windows 95 user interface was based on the initial design work that was done on the Cairo user interface."

Wow, never thought of 98/98SE as 4.x point releases, or Me as 5.0, or XP Home and Pro as descendant SKUs for 3.1 and NT 3.1.

Windows Me was still in 95/98 development line and is internally versioned as 4.2. 2000 and XP were 5.x, Vista was 6.0, Windows 7 was 6.1, Windows 8 was 6.2, and Windows 10 probably would have been internally 7.0 if they hadn't bumped the internal number forward to match.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Microsoft_Windows_vers...

Heh, yeah, I remember when they switched to labelling everything by year. Those of us on the development teams thought that was seriously tempting fate given our track record of routinely shipping things a year late.

to that point, wasn't 95 actually released in '96?

I was like 13 but thats what I remember...

Heh, no, but it was a close call. Shipped in August of 95. I was working on Office "95" at the time, and we were seriously under the gun, for a few reasons. Firstly, it came down from on high that all Office apps needed to be ported to 32-bit, as opposed to running in Win95's 16 bit subsystem (this was a massive job, and introduced numerous bugs). And to make matters worse, this was a time when software was delivered in boxes, which contained CDRoms, or 3.25" floppies, as the customer desired. Win95 had completely reserved all of msft's manufacturing capacity for like 6-7 weeks, so in order to ship in 95, we had to ship like 2 months earlier than a normal release.

3.5" or 5.25" :)

Actually, 90mm.

* http://jdebp.uk./FGA/floppy-discs-are-90mm-not-3-and-a-half-...

that's right. 3.5... 5.25 was long past.

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