I know Win2k was a major project for Microsoft and they spend something like 5 billion on it.
WindowsXP is the first Microsoft OS that unified Win9x and Win2k seriece.
Anyone can give me a scale of the project WinXP was and how much it cost ?
Also from the book “Breaking Windows” it was mentioned that Microsoft had a need for an operating system that unfied both networking capabilities of NT and features of Win9x going all the way back in the 80 but the project just stalled and delayed untill late 90s. Can someone tell this story and also how new WinXP fits into it ?
That makes sense, but win2k was meant to be that - and was, somewhat. XP is really just a late addition that corrects what win2k didn’t have time to do.
Win XP did not unify 9.x and NT, no matter what Microsoft says to the contrary. The 9.x line is backward compatible to DOS. The NT line sacrifices backwards compatibility to make the operating system “better”. They are two incompatible philosophies. Microsoft didn’t merge them, they killed off the 9.x line so they wouldn’t have to maintain it any more.
They added enough home-ish kind of things to XP so you would think it was the successor to the 9.x line. ME was 9.x with some 9.x features intentionally removed and some NT things put in, kind of a halfway step between 9.x and NT.
If you look at how the operating systems number themselves, win2k is NT 5.0, and XP is NT 5.1. I think that’s more accurate to describe how the operating systems are related than the official Microsoft names and all of the advertising hype that goes along with them.
From what I can see, and I haven’t had that much of a chance to play with it yet, XP is more of a facelift to win2k. Doesn’t seem to be any dramatic changes in the guts of the thing. Looks like lots of effort went into the bundled apps though. It’s the old Microsoft “Don’t buy anyone else’s programs, just by our stuff” philosophy I guess. You can tell they made a major effort to go after the multimedia apps.
First isnt XP also backward compatible to DOS. I had not had any trouble running 16 bit Dos apps on Win2k assembled with MASM611.
I realy want to know how the project of Win 2k and WinXP has evolved since its first inception. What was microsoft decision making in starting Win2k and XP development.
The only new major feature I’ve noticed, and, for that matter, explains the “connection” between 9x and NT is:
There’s an integrated ability to run virtual machines with the properties of previous OSes (nt 3.51, 4.0, win95, 98, ME) in the same way that 9x currently gives DOS it’s own VM. So XP has better ability to run dos/9x/ect programs than 2k did, but it’s not “integrating” the two OS lines.