Cairo was the codename for a project at

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

from 1991 to 1996. Its charter was to build technologies for a next-generation

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware and software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ...

that would fulfill

Bill Gates William Henry Gates III (born October 28, 1955) is an American businessman and philanthropist. A pioneer of the microcomputer revolution of the 1970s and 1980s, he co-founded the software company Microsoft in 1975 with his childhood friend ...

's vision of "information at your fingertips." Cairo never shipped, although portions of its technologies have since appeared in other products.

Overview

Cairo was announced at the 1991

Professional Developers Conference Microsoft's Professional Developers Conference (PDC) was a series of conferences for software developers; the conference was held infrequently to coincide with beta releases of the Microsoft Windows, Windows operating system, and showcased topic ...

Jim Allchin James Edward Allchin (born 1951, Grand Rapids, Michigan, United States) is an American computer scientist, philanthropist and guitarist best known for being a former Microsoft executive. He assisted Microsoft in creating many of the system plat ...

. It was demonstrated publicly (including a demo system for all attendees to use) at the 1993 Cairo/Win95 PDC. Microsoft changed its stance on Cairo several times, sometimes calling it a product, other times referring to it as a collection of technologies.

Features

Cairo used

distributed computing Distributed computing is a field of computer science that studies distributed systems, defined as computer systems whose inter-communicating components are located on different networked computers. The components of a distributed system commu ...

concepts to make information available quickly and seamlessly across a worldwide network of computers. The

Windows 95 Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft and the first of its Windows 9x family of operating systems, released to manufacturing on July 14, 1995, and generally to retail on August 24, 1995. Windows 95 merged ...

user interface was based on the initial design work that was done on the Cairo user interface.

DCE/RPC DCE/RPC, short for "Distributed Computing Environment / Remote Procedure Calls", is the remote procedure call system developed for the Distributed Computing Environment (DCE). This system allows programmers to write distributed software as if it ...

shipped in Windows NT 3.1. Content Indexing is now a part of Internet Information Server and Windows Desktop Search. The remaining component is the object file system. It was once planned to be implemented in the form of WinFS as part of

Windows Vista Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was the direct successor to Windows XP, released five years earlier, which was then the longest time span between successive releases of Microsoft W ...

but development was cancelled in June 2006, with some of its technologies merged into other Microsoft products such as Microsoft SQL Server 2008, also known under the codename "Katmai".

References

;Notes * * * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Cairo (Operating System) Distributed operating systems Microsoft Windows Microsoft operating systems Object-oriented operating systems Uncompleted Microsoft initiatives

Overview

Features

See also

References