this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2025
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Do you remember Windows 95? How about Windows 96? (timemachiner.io)
submitted 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago) by macstainless@discuss.tchncs.de to c/technology@lemmy.world
31 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

That’s not a typo. Windows 96 promised to build on the success of Windows 95, yet it never materialized as originally intended.

I only learned about this a few months ago. To me, this was an incredibly fascinating discovery and wanted to write about & share it.

"The Windows That Never Was"

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[–] Phen@lemmy.eco.br 10 points 2 days ago (2 children)

Windows Vista is Microsoft's greatest success, because it's main purpose was to make people forget the promises made for Longhorn.

[–] tinned_tomatoes@feddit.uk 5 points 2 days ago (2 children)

I do kinda wish we had gotten WinFS. All the "ideas" of it seemed cool, just impossible to implement without breaking every existing application.

[–] LWD@lemm.ee 6 points 2 days ago

If Windows is (was) good at anything, it's maintaining backwards compatibility for longer than anyone expects them to. Never mind revolutionizing their entire file system, Windows 11 is still backwards-compatible with batch files written before we had folders.

[–] hansolo@lemmy.today 0 points 2 days ago (2 children)

FS?

As in "F'ing Shit"?

[–] megabyteX@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago

Future Storage aka WinFS. It was a cool idea, metadata based relational db file system. But the execution was horrible, SQL Server based file system which was exposed via .NET IIRC.

Desktop search was supposed to be revolutionized, but it was scrapped just before Vista was released

[–] rigatti@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago (1 children)

If I recall, it was a new file system. So instead if folders, every file would just kind of have tags and could be dynamically grouped like that. I could very well be wrong, but I remember being excited for it.

[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Can we please have a FUSE FS like this?

[–] catloaf@lemm.ee 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I was curious, so I found this: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3263036/file-system-that-uses-tags-rather-than-folders

One of the projects they mention is tagfs, which sounds like it does what you want: http://github.com/marook/tagfs

[–] MonkderVierte@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 day ago

Ha, thanks for searching!

[–] dogslayeggs@lemmy.world 4 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Longhorn... the hype was strong with that one. I don't even remember what the hype was about, just that Longhorn was supposed to be amazing.