Reading Peter Coffees April 3 Epicenters column, with its reference to Microsofts Cairo (“Storing Up My Disappointment,”), reminded me of February 1993: I had been invited, along with 300 of my closest friends, to participate in the first Windows NT 3.1 training and certification hosted by Microsoft at the Sheraton Hotel Ballroom in Seattle.
For three long days, information was hammered into our heads, and, at the end, everyone took both the server and workstation tests for 3.1. (Oh, and I passed both!) Anyway, at that training, they talked of Cairo, and two of the biggest features I remember were the Object-Oriented File System (referred to in Coffees column) and Directory Services (Active Directory today).
In fact, I remember that the initial release of Exchange Server was to use Directory Services in the operating system, and, so, in its absence, we dubbed Exchange 4.0 Cairo .75.
It shall be interesting to see what the next 20 years bring.
Eric G. Steinberg
Managing Partner
Teclink
Denver