Windows 2000

~ the goodbye ~

Windows 2000 was Windows NT 5.0 with the version number taken off the box. Microsoft released it to manufacturing on 15 December 1999 and put it on shelves on 17 February 2000, in four editions running from Professional on a desk up to Datacenter Server, which arrived on 26 September that year. It was aimed at business and at servers, which is why the consumer line got Windows Me a few months later instead.

Three days before the retail launch, Mary Jo Foley reported on a leaked internal memo that counted over 63,000 potential known defects. Microsoft was advertising the release as a standard in reliability at the time. The number went around the trade press for a few weeks and then stopped mattering, because the thing turned out to be solid the way NT had always been solid, and nobody who had lived through a Windows 98 afternoon was going to argue with it over a spreadsheet.

The version I actually sat in front of was never the one at home. Home in Turkey was 98 and then XP, on a machine hanging off a TTNet line. Windows 2000 was what the university labs ran, and what offices ran, and it had the particular feel of a machine somebody else administered. There was a login box you could not get around and a C drive that refused you halfway into it.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what it was for ~

Active Directory is why it mattered. Before it, a Windows network was a pile of NT domains stitched together with trust relationships that administrators drew on whiteboards and then argued about. Active Directory replaced all of that with one hierarchical directory covering users and machines. More than twenty-five years on, an enormous share of the world's office logins still resolve through a descendant of what shipped in that box.

The rest of the release was quieter and just as durable. NTFS 3.0 arrived with it, along with the Encrypting File System and dynamic disks, and plug and play finally worked properly on the NT kernel. Both the original Xbox and the Xbox 360 ran modified Windows 2000 kernels, which is a strange afterlife for an operating system sold to system administrators.

~ the leak ~

On or shortly before 12 February 2004, portions of the Windows 2000 and Windows NT 4.0 source code were posted to the internet. Microsoft published a statement calling it illegal and warning people away from it, and the archive spread across file-sharing networks anyway. Four days later somebody reported an Internet Explorer exploit they said had come out of reading the leaked code.

It was portions rather than the whole tree, and it came out of a third party rather than out of Redmond. Nobody built a rival Windows from it. What it did was give a generation of security researchers their first look at how the thing was actually assembled, at a moment when Microsoft still treated that as a trade secret.

~ the last patch ~

Mainstream support ended on 30 June 2005. Microsoft had planned a fifth service pack, cancelled it early, and shipped Update Rollup 1 for Service Pack 4 on 13 September 2005 instead. That was the last real body of work anyone did on the product.

On 8 September 2009 Microsoft skipped two of the five security flaws in that month's update, saying a fix for one of the critical ones was infeasible. That is an unusual thing for a vendor to publish about a product it is still supporting, and it was fair warning. Extended support ended on 13 July 2010 and the patches stopped. Machines kept running it in factories and in hospital basements for years afterward, unpatched, doing the one job they had been bought for.

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