Windows XP

» see microsoft.com/windowsxp as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Windows XP was on every machine in the computer-engineering lab when i started university in ankara around 2003. The home pc had it too. ttnet adsl had not yet fully replaced the dial-up at home, so XP was the OS through which my last 33.6k sessions and first broadband sessions happened. The CRTs had Bliss as the default wallpaper, that rolling green napa hill that nobody at the lab ever bothered to change.

Microsoft released XP to manufacturing on August 24 2001 and shipped it to retail on October 25 of the same year, codenamed Whistler after the ski resort where the team had been on a retreat. The launch carried a marketing campaign microsoft costed at roughly a billion dollars. Underneath the new theme, the real change was that this consumer Windows ran on the Windows 2000 NT kernel rather than on the 9x lineage. That is the reason XP mostly stopped crashing on the consumer side.

Mainstream support ended in April 2009. Extended support ran another five years and ended on April 8 2014. By the time microsoft finally pulled the plug, XP had been the most-used desktop OS on Earth from 2002 until Windows 7 overtook it in August 2012. After the 2014 cutoff, roughly 95 percent of the world's 3 million ATMs were still booting into it, and around half of all desktops in china still ran it.

~ the record ~

~ what it actually was ~

XP was the first consumer Windows that sat on the NT kernel. The Windows 9x line had run from 95 through 98 and the unloved ME release, while the NT line had run quietly through 3.51 and 2000 on the business side. XP fused the two. The user-visible part was the Luna theme with its green start button and blue taskbar, plus the Bliss wallpaper that Charles O'Rear had photographed in napa valley back in 1996. The under-the-hood part was the protected-memory kernel that made the 9x-era stop-error culture mostly recede.

Service Pack 2 in August 2004 enabled the Windows Firewall by default, which finally closed off the Blaster-era worm wave that had been turning unpatched home XP machines into open relays. Until SP2 it was genuinely possible to get an XP box infected by simply being on a cable modem with the firewall off. After SP2 the OS felt like the same product, but the consumer-internet baseline had shifted.

~ why it stuck ~

The product stuck because the next two microsoft releases were both worse on arrival. Vista in 2007 came in heavy on hardware requirements and was rolled back across most large IT shops. The reliability of XP became a baseline that enterprise simply refused to give up. Even after Windows 7 fixed most of the Vista problems in 2009, the embedded-XP install base in ATMs and retail tills was already huge and effectively immovable for cost reasons. Microsoft kept extending the support window because the install base would not migrate.

By the 2014 cutoff XP was still on ATMs across most of the world. It was also on a large share of NHS workstations in the UK and on chinese government desktops. Custom support contracts continued past April 8 for entities willing to pay microsoft directly, and bootleg patches circulated through the embedded-systems community for years after.

~ the legacy ~

For me, XP was the OS i did most of school on. By the time microsoft killed it in 2014, i had already moved to Windows 7 at home, but XP boxes kept turning up at family relatives' houses and at small businesses in ankara well past the cutoff. The Bliss wallpaper is the closest thing i have to a default mental image of an early-2000s computer screen.

The product had a longer working life than any Windows release before or since. Vista lasted three years before 7 replaced it. Windows 8 lasted two before 8.1, then 10. XP held the consumer and embedded slots for the better part of a decade past its own intended replacement date, and the cultural memory of it still functions as shorthand for the period when the personal computer fully arrived and then sat there, mostly working, for long enough that people stopped thinking about which version of Windows they were on.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »