A run of Geek stuff these days, but no, I’m not at the PDC. I’m watching the fallout from it while stuck at home, actually, and have been amused for the most part. One thing that I feel compelled to say: Blessed be Microsoft, for the introduction of partial classes to the C# language. What else does Microsoft have planned for Longhorn?
Frankly there’s too much to get into. There’s four families of technology that are coming together for the finished product: WinFS for file storage, Avalon as a new UI technology, Aero are the new Windows applications, and Indigo as the de-facto communication layer. [Yes, fellow Geeks, this is a watered down description to be sure, but I don’t want non-Geek readers getting more scared than already are!] And right now, all four groups are finally able to expose what they’ve been working on for the first time. A lot of the work for these technologies has been going on for years now, but this is the first time that it’s been revealed beyond a couple of Longhorn screen shots. Pretty impressive, what’s been going on out there in Redmond. Very impressive.
Why should you care? Well, I’ve been following Microsoft’s products for a long while. In fact I remember when Windows 286/386 was being sold in Software Etc. in the local mall, where it almost lost with all of the Commodore 64 gaming software. I remember when DOS 2.11 was state of the art. I’ve been around for a long while so I might have a unique – or at least skewed – perspective of the tech world, but there’s one thing that I’m sure of: quite often, hardware has held back software. Look back to 1994, when Disclosure had come out: the big Wow was the VR based database. Think that was the first time someone dreamed of viewing their data in a VR setting? Hah. Even Tron wasn’t the first attempt at a virtually physical world… people have always dreamed up interfaces and technology that far out paced their current hardware.
Microsoft has suffered from this hardware limitation for years, with the rest of us. Graphical data objects on PC’s were dreamed of back in the day of DOS 2.11 but it wasn’t until Windows 3.0 (and DOS 5, I believe) that they could attempt a first try at it. Hardware had to be faster and memory had to be cheaper before a system like Windows 3.0 would be able to run at an acceptable speed. It was the 486 chip that started to make Windows viable; memory also dropped in price around this time, and software greedily started to use the new pace and space. Now we’ve got the Pentium 4 running at 3GHz as a pretty common CPU. The Pentium 4 would be the 886, if the x86 naming continued and it’s running at 3000MHz where the basic 486DX ran at 33MHz. Never mind the speed increases that you’d see moving between the different chip families – remember that a 486DX 25MHz was 4 times as fast as a 386DX 25MHz – so the machines today are light years faster and are still at least 1/4 of the price from years past.
The bottom line? The machines have the power that engineers have dreamed of for years. Microsoft is about to be unleashed onto a PC nation that has more power available than ever before and the results should be remarkable, once Longhorn is released.
The world is about to see what Microsoft can really do with software.