The Off-Key Bard
History

This Day in History — Windows XP Arrives

On this day in 2001

On October 25, 2001, Microsoft released Windows XP, bringing the Windows NT foundation to home PCs and ending the DOS-based line of Windows 95, 98, and Me.

The Off-Key Bard sits down at a personal computer in October 2001. The monitor is bulky, the Internet might still arrive over a dial-up connection, and the familiar sounds of Windows fill the room. But something is changing. Gone is the gray, businesslike look of earlier Windows. In its place are a bright blue taskbar, a green Start button, and a rolling grassy hillside beneath an almost impossibly blue sky. And underneath that cheerful surface is a far more important transformation.

"For the first time, Microsoft's mainstream home and business versions of Windows are finally sharing the same modern operating-system foundation."

On October 25, 2001, Microsoft released Windows XP at retail worldwide, with Windows XP Home Edition for individuals and families and Windows XP Professional for businesses and power users. Built on the Windows NT line, which in this version carried the number 5.1, XP replaced both Windows Me for home users and Windows 2000 for business. It brought the NT architecture to the mainstream consumer market and ended the DOS-based Windows family that began with Windows 95. Its colorful interface and broad compatibility made it one of the most recognizable and enduring versions of Windows ever produced, though its importance went well beyond its looks.

Two Families of Windows

To understand why that mattered, we have to go back to how Windows evolved. Windows 3.0, a major success in 1990, helped establish graphical computing on the PC. Windows 95 arrived in August 1995 and was followed by Windows 98 in June 1998 and Windows Me in September 2000. All three were built on top of MS-DOS, which served as a boot loader and a layer for 16-bit legacy drivers. That design carried real costs. In the Windows 9x line, applications could overwrite the first megabyte of memory, which was not protected, and drivers shared the kernel's address space. The series was known for crashes and freezes, and Windows Me, which added System Restore, was widely criticized for instability.

Meanwhile, Microsoft was building a different system. Windows NT 3.1 arrived on July 27, 1993, as the first Windows NT, aimed at the workstation and server markets. Its kernel could interrupt running tasks to schedule others, and it used 32-bit flat virtual memory addressing. It supported access control lists on files and other objects, and it kept user-mode programs separate from the kernel's unrestricted access. Windows NT 4.0, released on August 24, 1996, adopted the shell of Windows 95, with its taskbar and Start menu, and Windows 2000 followed on February 17, 2000.

For years, Microsoft maintained both families side by side, one for the home and one for business. That meant duplicate engineering work for the company and a Windows platform split in two.

One Foundation

Microsoft first tried to modernize each line separately. The consumer project was code-named Neptune and the business successor to Windows 2000 was Odyssey, but in early 2000 the company merged the two teams and shelved both in favor of a single NT-based platform code-named Whistler. The name came from Whistler, British Columbia, because many Microsoft employees skied at the nearby Whistler-Blackcomb resort. On February 5, 2001, Whistler was unveiled as Windows XP, with "XP" standing for "experience."

The engineering change was larger than the branding. XP's NT 5.1 foundation gave home users an architecture that had previously belonged to business computing. It did not end crashes. Poorly written drivers and applications could still destabilize a system, and compatibility problems remained. But compared with the DOS-based systems it replaced, it was a substantial step up in reliability. To soften the transition, XP also added a compatibility mode to help older software run.

The two editions shared the same core but differed in features. Home left out business functions, including joining a Windows domain, and it supported one physical processor, while Professional supported two. Windows 98 and Me could upgrade to either edition, but Windows NT 4.0 and 2000 could upgrade only to Professional.

A Friendlier Face

The new visual style, Luna, gave Windows rounded controls, vivid colors, and a redesigned two-column Start menu. XP also added ClearType to sharpen text on LCD screens. New features aimed at everyday users included Fast User Switching, which let several people share a PC without closing each other's programs, an improved System Restore, and Remote Assistance and Remote Desktop for connecting to a computer over a network.

Then there was the wallpaper. Originally titled "Bucolic Green Hills" and later renamed Bliss, it was a photograph taken by Charles O'Rear, a former National Geographic photographer, in January 1996. He stopped on the Sonoma Highway near the Napa–Sonoma county line in southern Sonoma County, California, and shot it on a Mamiya RZ67 medium-format camera with Fujifilm Velvia film. O'Rear says he did not digitally enhance or manipulate the photo, though the agency that sold it made minor alterations to the digitized version. In 2000, Microsoft bought full rights to the image. The price is undisclosed, though it has been reported as "in the low six figures." For millions of users, that grassy hill became inseparable from the experience of using a computer.

Launch Day

Windows XP was completed on August 24, 2001, when Microsoft announced release to manufacturing (RTM) of build 2600 at a ceremony on its Redmond campus. PC makers could begin shipping XP-based systems on September 24, and the retail release followed on October 25. Microsoft had planned to spend at least $1 billion on marketing with Intel and PC makers.

The company held its launch event in New York City, in the Marriott Marquis Theatre in Times Square. It came only 44 days after the September 11 attacks, and Microsoft replaced its "Prepare to Fly" slogan with "Yes You Can." Bill Gates gave the keynote, and New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani joined him on stage and received a long standing ovation. Gates called it a great day for PC users and the PC industry, said, "With the launch of Windows XP, we are entering an exciting new era of personal computing," and added that New York "is absolutely open for business." Regis Philbin demonstrated the product's ease of use. At one point, Gates typed "exit" at a DOS command prompt "for the last time," marking the end of Microsoft's 20-year DOS-based era, and noted that about 400 million PCs were still running DOS-based versions of Windows.

Growing Pains

Not every part of the launch was welcome. Windows XP introduced Windows Product Activation, a system to curb piracy. Unless a copy was activated within 30 days of installation, it stopped functioning. Activation, over the Internet or by phone, tied a license to an ID generated from the computer's hardware, and significant hardware changes could require reactivation. Many users resented the added step.

XP's larger problem was security. The original release shipped with the Internet Connection Firewall, but a host-based firewall was not a default feature, and as broadband spread, PCs spent more time online and exposed to attack. On August 11, 2003, the Blaster worm began spreading through a flaw in the Windows RPC service, one that Microsoft had patched on July 16. It infected about 30,000 systems by August 12 and about 423,000 by August 15, hitting Windows XP and Windows 2000. In April 2004, the Sasser worm, released by a German student on his 18th birthday, exploited a flaw in another Windows component, again after a patch had been available for 17 days. Sasser disrupted Agence France-Presse's satellite communications, forced Delta Air Lines to cancel several trans-Atlantic flights, and closed 130 bank and insurance offices in Finland.

Microsoft's response had begun before either worm. On January 15, 2002, Bill Gates sent employees a memo launching the Trustworthy Computing initiative, which covered security, privacy, reliability, and business integrity. In it, he wrote, "When we face a choice between adding features and resolving security issues, we need to choose security." Computerworld reports that Microsoft paused product development to review code for security holes, which contributed to the delay of the project that became Windows Vista.

The clearest change came on August 25, 2004, with Windows XP Service Pack 2. It renamed the firewall Windows Firewall and turned it on by default, added a Security Center to monitor firewall, automatic update, and virus protection, enabled a pop-up blocker in Internet Explorer, and strengthened Data Execution Prevention to help stop some buffer-overflow attacks. Service Pack 3 followed in 2008, with a release window that ran from April 29 to June 10.

A Very Long Afterlife

XP's popularity lasted. According to Net Applications, it was the world's most widely used operating system until August 2012, and StatCounter's figures suggest it lost the top spot almost a year earlier. Hardware makers shipped XP drivers, businesses built software around it, and schools and families learned computing on it. It also remained a gaming platform: Steam did not end XP support until January 1, 2019.

Its successor had a rocky start. Windows Vista reached the public on January 30, 2007, to a mixed reception driven by higher hardware requirements, a perceived slowness compared with XP, and driver and program compatibility problems. Windows 7, generally available on October 22, 2009, earned mostly favorable reviews. Even so, XP lingered. By January 2014, Net Applications still put XP at 29.23 percent of desktop operating systems, and Windows 7 had 47.49 percent by February.

Microsoft stopped retail sales and general OEM licensing on June 30, 2008, ended mainstream support on April 14, 2009, and ended extended support on April 8, 2014, after more than twelve years. Free security updates stopped that day. A paid Custom Support plan continued for some customers, including the governments of the Netherlands and the United Kingdom, and Microsoft later released emergency patches in May 2014, May 2017 during the WannaCry outbreak, and May 2019 for the BlueKeep flaw. Many ATMs and Chinese computers were still running XP in 2014. The computers did not stop working, but without regular updates, newly discovered vulnerabilities could go unpatched on connected systems.

XP's long life shows how deeply an operating system can become embedded in the world around it. It also shows the difficulty of preserving compatibility while improving security.

"A grassy hill, a sky of blue,
A brighter Windows came in view.
Through games and work, its years would fly—
Yet still we know that XP sky."

Windows XP matters because it combined a familiar consumer experience with a more modern foundation. For home users, it brought NT's reliability advantages into everyday computing. For businesses, it continued the Windows 2000 platform. And for Microsoft, it meant the end of maintaining two mainstream Windows families. It was far from perfect, with security holes, licensing frustrations, and compatibility headaches. But it was also useful and familiar for an extraordinarily long time, and a generation of users learned to use a computer on it.

On October 25, 2001, Microsoft released Windows XP to consumers worldwide, bringing its home and professional Windows products onto the Windows NT foundation. With its recognizable interface, improved stability, and remarkable longevity, XP became one of the defining operating systems of the personal computer era.

Sources

← Back to the Desk — History