From the I-wasn’t-aware-of-that dept.

August 3rd, 2005 · No Comments

Windows Vista, I assumed, was all new. Built from the ground up to address the shortcomings of Windows XP/2003. A new modern OS in other words. This isn’t the case.

In mid-2004, Microsoft halted Longhorn development, restarted the project using the Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1 (SP1) code base, and componentized the core of the system before adding back much of the work other teams at the software giant had already completed.

Source: http://winsupersite.com/reviews/winvista_beta1_03.asp

So Vista is based on the Windows 2003 codebase, which was built from Windows 2000 and previous to that NT4. It isn’t new, or modern. Something happened in Redmond that made them scrap Vista in 2004, it was so bad that they dropped the project and decided to reuse old code. I’ve not heard this elsewhere, is it accurate - and if it is why isn’t it more known?

(Or didn’t I get the memo)