Windows Neptune

~ the obituary ~

in january 2000 i was at home on a dial-up line, and a leaked operating system build was several hundred megabytes. That is not a download. That is a decision to occupy the household phone for most of a day and then discover the archive is corrupt. Neptune leaked into a world i was technically connected to and practically could not reach.

The problem Neptune was built to solve was that Microsoft had been shipping two unrelated operating systems for most of a decade. Everything from Windows 95 through Windows Me had DOS underneath it, which is why those machines crashed the way they crashed. Windows NT and 2000 were a real kernel with memory protection and multiple users, and they ran nothing a home user owned. Every version of the plan to end that split was late.

Neptune was the consumer half of the plan drawn up in 1999. Odyssey was the business half, the successor to Windows 2000, on the same codebase. Between them they were supposed to retire the DOS line and put every Windows machine on the NT kernel, which is a thing the company had been promising and postponing since the early nineties.

Exactly one build was made, numbered 5111, and it went privately to developers in december 1999. On 24 january 2000 the warez group Pirates with Attitudes put it on the internet. The next day the trade press was reporting that Neptune and Odyssey had both been cancelled and merged into a project codenamed Whistler. The only version anybody outside Microsoft ever ran was already obsolete when it arrived.

~ the case file ~

~ what was in the build ~

Build 5111 is Windows 2000 with a consumer shell bolted onto it, and the interesting part is the shell. Microsoft was working on what it called Activity Centers, full screen HTML surfaces that organized a task rather than a folder, so that your photos or your music had a place that was not a directory listing. The idea was to hide the file system from people who had never wanted to see it.

The other survivor is the logon screen. Neptune replaced the username and password box with a page of user tiles you clicked on, one per person in the house, which is exactly what Windows XP shipped with two years later and what every consumer operating system uses now. Activity Centers did not survive. The welcome screen did, and it is the single most visible piece of Neptune in daily use today.

~ how it actually ended ~

The stated reason for the merge was efficiency. Two teams were building two products on one codebase, both of them heavy on hardware requirements, and it made more sense to build one and configure it differently for home and office. That is the correct decision and it is also the decision that produced a two year gap, because Whistler took until october 2001 to ship as Windows XP.

Something had to fill that gap, and what filled it was Windows Me, released in september 2000, the last consumer version built on DOS. Me is remembered as the worst release Microsoft ever shipped. It exists because the good plan was cancelled in january and the shelf could not be left empty for eighteen months.

~ what came after ~

There is no product to mourn here. Neptune never had users and never had a price. What it has instead is a build number that a certain kind of person can still recite, and an afterlife in the enthusiast archives where leaked Microsoft builds get catalogued and run in virtual machines by people who were not born when it leaked.

The leak itself accomplished nothing. Microsoft's plans had already changed, the build was already dead inside the company, and the warez group distributed a corpse one day before the funeral was announced. The scene treated it as a prize. It was a discontinued prototype with a good logon screen.

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