In the early 1990s, Microsoft worked Windows nerds (like me) into a frenzy of anticipation by leaking tons of information about “Cairo,” a loosely defined set of features that was supposed to turn into a product. Alas, Cairo never materialized. Some of its pieces -- defined, undefined, speculated, regurgitated -- appeared in other products, but Cairo itself faded into the desert dust.

All this happened in the soon-to-be-explosive atmosphere between Jim Allchin and Brad Silverberg (see next slide). Gates hired Allchin in 1990 to take the reins of Windows NT 3.5, then he was put in charge of Cairo. Gates hired Silverberg in 1990 to lead the DOS and Windows efforts. After Win95 shipped, with an eye to the cloud, he led the newly created Internet Platform and Tools Division.

At the Win32 Professional Developer’s Conference in July 1992, Allchin gave a presentation about future Microsoft OS Cairo and how it would fulfill Gates’ vision of “information at your fingertips.” (Unfortunately, I can’t find a transcript of his talk, but Bill Gates’ keynote, which mentions Allchin’s presentation is available on YouTube.) In mid-1992, Cairo was viewed as a mainstream operating system, apparently a modified version of Windows NT. At the Dec 1993 Cairo/Win95 Professional Developer’s Conference, Allchin showed off a demo running Cairo. But it never came to pass.

Cairo was many things to many people, but the glue that held much of it together was the Cairo Object File System, later renamed “WinFS” for “Windows File System.” Jon Udell wrote a Sept. 7, 2005, column in InfoWorld that goes into many of the details. At one point, Bill Gates was quoted as saying that Windows Media Player, Photo Gallery, Office, and Outlook would use WinFS. Even though Gates continued whipping up the troops a decade later -- his 2003 Professional Developer’s Conference announcement is a prime example -- WinFS died a painful, public death, although (as you will see) it was resurrected for project Longhorn. Developers who lived through the spectacle and the anticipation never viewed Microsoft the same way.

In the early 1990s, many of us thought that NT 4.0 would be (or resemble) Cairo. NT 4.0 arrived and it looked a lot like the Win95 UI on top of NT 3.5. We figured NT 5 (Windows 2000) would be Cairo -- nope. Windows XP and Server 2003 didn’t look anything like Cairo. There was an official mention of Cairo’s demise on the Channel 9 MSDN channel, “A few words about WinFS: The project is CLOSED,” posted in Decemeber 2006, but even that post has been pulled.