Thursday, May 8, 2008

6.0.4084.0.main.040527-0915

Around the time of WinHEC 2004 Microsoft realised that in its current form Longhorn was doomed. It was far too complex to reach the next milestone, componentisation (turning it into a fully modular OS). Towards the end of the Milestone 7 period it was decided to strip everything out to try and reach that goal piece by piece. The 408x and 409x builds are a result of that - pretty much everything was stripped out of the OS to get the system down to its bare minimum working configuration, with features being re-added as the OS was componentised.

4084 is one such build - everything, even as far as the wallpaper was stripped out. This was Microsoft's last ditch attempt before they accepted that the only way forward was to start from scratch and componentise before adding anything else to the OS. In the end, that is what Microsoft committed to doing and as a result Vista development was much more managed and doable. Beginning with the Reset, it took Microsoft a little over two years to create Vista.

1 comments:

Unknown said...

Build 4084, and 4088 desktop versions exist, on Betaarchive FTP they are, I also got 4084 downloaded from a site where someone uploaded it to