Programming Windows: Cairo, a Road Not Taken (Premium)

Windows NT was released in 1993 and was described by First Boston as “the most aggressive piece of software ever written by mankind.” That sounds hyperbolic. But it was, in some ways, an understatement: While many saw NT as some future successor to MS-DOS, Bill Gates and Microsoft viewed NT as nothing less than the future, a “universal interface” between all computers. Microsoft’s goal for NT was simple, and it amounted to the chant I later heard at the firm’s Redmond campus: “NT EVERYWHERE.”

Before NT could be a ubiquitous engine for Microsoft’s future, however, it needed to be improved, as early versions were slow and incompatible with most hardware peripherals. And so Microsoft improved NT alongside the DOS-based versions of Windows in the mid-1990s, releasing the second major release, Windows NT 3.5 (“Daytona”), in September 1994. And then a minor update focused on PowerPC and called Windows NT 3.51 shipped in May 1995.

Those releases were created by the core NT team headed by Dave Cutler. But a second NT team, led by Jim Allchin, was separately working on a coming major update to the product that was codenamed “Cairo.” Cairo was in many ways as ambitious as the original NT, and it would deliver what computer scientists of the early 1990s considered to be state of the art: An object-oriented desktop built on top of COM technologies, an object-oriented file system built on SQL database technologies, an object-oriented software development environment built on Visual C++, and an object-oriented directory services networking infrastructure.

Cairo was an explicit acknowledgment from Microsoft that it was collectively tired of being viewed as second-rate within the industry. NT had been developed by a core team with origins outside of Microsoft, and so, too, would be Cairo: Mr. Allchin came to Microsoft from networking pioneer Banyan, where he had created the VINES distributed operating system. He would go on to create Microsoft’s Server business and lead NT and then overall Windows development for over a decade.

The timing was good for Microsoft to take a step up in quality. Windows was already ubiquitous on the PC desktop, but it was a shaky foundation at best. And the market was expanding into network-connected PCs, workstations, and servers as well as into devices-based consumer electronics. Companies like NeXT were pioneering OOP-based OSes and application development platforms. And companies like Novell were making advanced in networking, and in directory services.

The goals for Cairo were impressive.

The Cairo user interface was to be based on a desktop model similar to that used by the Mac. The special purpose manager applications from Windows 3.x--File Manager, Program Manager, and Print Manager--were gone, replaced by direct manipulation techniques like drag and drop in a new interface called Explorer. Objects in the UI exposed their behaviors via right-click context menus, and those o...