Cairo was the codename for a project at

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washing ...

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, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also in ...

that would fulfill

Bill Gates William Henry Gates III (born October 28, 1955) is an American business magnate and philanthropist. He is a co-founder of Microsoft, along with his late childhood friend Paul Allen. During his career at Microsoft, Gates held the positions ...

'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 Windows operating system, and showcased topics of interest to tho ...

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

. It was demonstrated publicly (including a demo system for all attendees to use) at the 1993 Cairo/Win95 PDC. Microsoft changed 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 A distributed system is a system whose components are located on different computer network, networked computers, which communicate and coordinate their actions by message passing, passing messages to one another from any system. Distributed com ...

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 as part of its Windows 9x family of operating systems. The first operating system in the 9x family, it is the successor to Windows 3.1x, and was released to manufacturin ...

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 w ...

shipped in Windows NT 3.1. Content Indexing is now a part of

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and

Windows Desktop Search Windows Search (also known as Instant Search) is a content index desktop search platform by Microsoft introduced in Windows Vista as a replacement for both the previous Indexing Service of Windows 2000 and the optional MSN Desktop Search for Wind ...

. The remaining component is the object file system. It was once planned to be implemented in the form of

WinFS WinFS (short for Windows Future Storage) was the code name for a canceled data storage and management system project based on relational databases, developed by Microsoft and first demonstrated in 2003 as an advanced storage subsystem for the Micro ...

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, which was released five years before, at the time being the longest time span between successive releases of ...

but development was cancelled in June 2006, with some of its technologies merged into other Microsoft products such as

Microsoft SQL Server 2008 The history of Microsoft SQL Server begins with the first Microsoft SQL Server database product – SQL Server v1.0, a 16-bit relational database for the OS/2 operating system, released in 1989. Versions Detailed history Genesis On June 12, 19 ...

, 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