wtf happened to blackcomb/vienna? it's NOT windows 7

By t4ki0n
in The Fast Ring (Insider Previews)

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t4ki0n

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yes, yes; it's windows 7, but it does NOT do justice to what blackcomb was all about! it was a journey to recode windows from scratch! right?! that's what the codename proudly bestowed! all they have done is recoded the kernel and now from what i'm reading win7 is going to be just a changed vista!!! ooooo MinWin ooooo HyperVisor! so what!? what happened to making everything modular and changing the application platform so that windows developers and 3rd-parties don't end up making hundreds of DLL's flying everywhere and stuff? it was supposed to be revolutionary! that's what talks were all about when it was still in the early days of Whistler/XP......

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mauriziocorso77

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yes, yes; it's windows 7, but it does NOT do justice to what blackcomb was all about! it was a journey to recode windows from scratch! right?! that's what the codename proudly bestowed! all they have done is recoded the kernel and now from what i'm reading win7 is going to be just a changed vista!!! ooooo MinWin ooooo HyperVisor! so what!? what happened to making everything modular and changing the application platform so that windows developers and 3rd-parties don't end up making hundreds of DLL's flying everywhere and stuff? it was supposed to be revolutionary! that's what talks were all about when it was still in the early days of Whistler/XP......

here here +1

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Roger H. Veteran

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They promised us flying cars "by the year 2000" and here we are nowhere close to that. That's 60yr old "promise" from like 1940s to 50s..

My point is that one can dream big dreams but getting them to come true usually takes lots of things to happen. There's things outside of your control too that influence your progress. So in a perfect world Microsoft would hire some guys and be like hey, this is what we want. The guys would slave for years and make it work. The planet would rejoice unanimously and name the day it's launched a worldwide holiday.

Too bad we actually live in the real world where wants and demands change all the time :) The flying cars need lots of different parts ot make it fly and also need the infrastructure inplace to handle that. Having a flying car now might have been a flop as maybe the world isn't ready for flying cars just yet.

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NeoXY

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Umm, it was around. It was never meant for commercial release. This was done in the MS Labs and was built as an experiment. So with all the millions MS spend each year on R&D on lots of different other things you DON'T hear about (so less things to b!tch about apperently) I'm sure what they've learned was incorporated into the release of windows.

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Brandon Live Veteran

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"Blackcomb" was a codename, nothing more. A sparkle in Jim Allchin's eye, perhaps. There was never a "plan" called Blackcomb, and certainly no project. No one ever promised anything. Your expectations for "Blackcomb" were unreasonable by the mere fact that you had any expectations at all.

The name is gone because those who came up with that name are gone. And because times have changed so much since it came about that whatever ideas anyone had 7-8 years ago aren't terribly meaningful anymore. The flying car analogy is a pretty good one, I think.

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brayan27

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They promised us flying cars "by the year 2000" and here we are nowhere close to that. That's 60yr old "promise" from like 1940s to 50s..

My point is that one can dream big dreams but getting them to come true usually takes lots of things to happen. There's things outside of your control too that influence your progress. So in a perfect world Microsoft would hire some guys and be like hey, this is what we want. The guys would slave for years and make it work. The planet would rejoice unanimously and name the day it's launched a worldwide holiday.

Too bad we actually live in the real world where wants and demands change all the time :) The flying cars need lots of different parts ot make it fly and also need the infrastructure inplace to handle that. Having a flying car now might have been a flop as maybe the world isn't ready for flying cars just yet.

you can already pre-order flying cars ;)

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Osiris

Posted
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Longhorn and blackcomb were just microsofts attempts to reach for the stars, unfortunately technology and expectations kept them weighted to the earth - and so we moved from the philosophy of revolution to, evolution, in the platform instead.

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t4ki0n

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Umm, it was around. It was never meant for commercial release. This was done in the MS Labs and was built as an experiment. So with all the millions MS spend each year on R&D on lots of different other things you DON'T hear about (so less things to b!tch about apperently) I'm sure what they've learned was incorporated into the release of windows.

...And I'm hypothesizing that what they've learned, is that having to lease a whole office building and fill 300 positions of programmers to go over every security bulletin in all of Windows history and attempt to check if each hole exists in the coded-from-Scratch Windows, would take decades to do (nevermind the money). lol.....

but hey.... didn't Apple do it? Isn't Mac OS X coded from scratch on FreeBSD as opposed to MacOS 9 or older being just RISC-type stuff? well I guess yea it is trouble; they had it standard to dual-boot between OS X and OS 9 until developers had time to make new Aqua-themed OS X-compatible apps..... imagine that happening on a Windows scale where it's the most used OS on Earth..... yea..... chaos...... meh......... i STILL think Windows from scratch would be a golden opportunity to make things right.... hmm... or maybe escape through the "window" into the "sky" and release a new OS called Microsoft Skies alongside Windows..... ok i'm rambling now so cya later lol but wait then you can't have application windows; you would have fluffy cloudy application skies; ok omg ok bye! lol

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PL_ Veteran

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but hey.... didn't Apple do it? Isn't Mac OS X coded from scratch on FreeBSD as opposed to MacOS 9 or older being just RISC-type stuff? well I guess yea it is trouble; they had it standard to dual-boot between OS X and OS 9 until developers had time to make new Aqua-themed OS X-compatible apps

Mac OS X is based off NEXTSTEP, an OS made by a company Apple purchased, thereby gaining the rights to their OS. NEXTSTEP is based off BSD, but I remember someone saying to me Mac OS X is about as much like BSD as Ubuntu is (not very)

Windows 7 is really just going to be Vista Second Edition......

Oh please, nobody knows barely anything about it yet.

Grand Master

.Kompressor

Posted
Posted

yep, I agree with thread starter.

MS is just continuing down the broken pot hole road.

It would be best to start clean...but with somehow making older versions of software run in some type of virtual space for backward compatibility.

you know like....Apple with their migration from PPC to Intel and their built in software that makes it possible....Rosetta.

That's the way it will have to go if they want to start clean....

But they should do it... Too much issues with Registry, DLL's, etc.... the bloated monster windows is becoming.

Grand Master

Linkinfamous

Posted
Posted
you know like....Apple with their migration from PPC to Intel and their built in software that makes it possible....Rosetta.

That was a CPU architecture change -- Not an OS architecture change. OSX is still fundamentally the same, just compiled for a different OS.

What you seem to want is a switch like Apple did from OS9 to OSX....but that's just silly. Apple had to do it. OS9 was a mess compared to more modern operating systems like Linux/Windows NT. It had no protected memory, multitasking, security concepts, etc.

There's no reason for Microsoft to make that kind of switch. Microsoft upgraded or flat out replaced many of the systems with Vista (Networking, security, audio, video, media, and so on) and look at how much people complained about that.

Grand Master

theyarecomingforyou

Posted
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Windows 7 is really just going to be Vista Second Edition......

We simply don't know enough about it to be be able to make any judgement at this stage. From what we know so far it appears it's not going to be a radical departure from Vista but that's a good thing, imo. It took months for all my software and drivers to be updated and for the performance of applications to come to close to that of XP - I don't want that to be the case everytime Microsoft release a new operating system. However, Microsoft screwed me over with Windows Ultimate Extras and I'm going to wait a while to decide if Win7 is worth the money.

Grand Master

+Nik Louch Subscriber²

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The flying car analogy is a pretty good one, I think.

100% agreed. It seemed like a "possibility" but now we see that "flying cars" are NOT the way forwards. Tichnology may eventually allow them, but the problems they would supposedly solve could be better solved in other ways.

Windows 7 is really just going to be Vista Second Edition......

Captain of the failboat!

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anthony

Posted
Posted

Blackcomb wasn't ever supposed to be a complete re-write of Windows. It was supposed to be the successor to Whistler (XP) they ended up deciding they wanted an incremental release between XP and Blackcomb and thus Longhorn started. The longer it took, the larger vision they had for Longhorn, and ironically the less features actually made it into the shipping Vista.

Anyways, the complete re-write of Windows was called Microsoft Singularity. More on that here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singularity_(operating_system)

Anyways, Blackcomb isn't technically dead, because it didn't ever exist. It was part of a larger roadmap Microsoft used to describe to developers and investors there future vision. The inital roadmap had Windows XP in 2001, Windows Longhorn in 2003 and Windows Blackcomb in 2006, funny how that worked out.

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