Red Mercury Labs

I couldn’t sleep, so I broke out my laptop to work on some code that is rattling around in my brain. I had to cold boot Windows XP, since I had shut it completely down earlier to install some Windows updates.

It’s dark, it’s quiet, the black Windows XP loading screen glows dimly on my screen…

“XP” … it sounds so natural now. I run “XP”. Most of my machines have “XP”, a few have “2000″. These are brands, everybody knows them. But why XP?

It rolls off the tongue easily enough, it sounds professional, but as trademarks go, it’s not so great. A two-letter non-word isn’t the most defensible trademark. That doesn’t matter so much, obviously the XP brand has power…

Why those letters?

The loading bar zooms left to right, left to right, never giving off a hint of how much is left to go, just letting me know it is still working on it…

Did it really stand for “Windows Experience?” The 2001 Microsoft press release claims this is so, but that sounds pretty weak, way too meaningless… almost like a convenient answer to satiate those who are curious enough to ask…

What else… around 2001, “Extreme Programming” had quite a buzz going in the programming world, and that was always referred to as “XP”. Perhaps some engineers at Microsoft liked what XP stood for and thought that it represented what Windows XP had under the hood?

But that doesn’t make much sense either. Extreme Programming was something happening outside of Microsoft, and it seems unlikely that they would take on the nickname of someone else’s methodology as their product name…

The loading bar continues.. left to right… left to right… “I’m loading… don’t you worry about how much is left to go, I’m on it…” XP… XP… what could it be…

Or, as on the loading screen, lowercase xp… xp… p is the greek letter “rho” … hm… oh yeah and of course, x is chi… “c.r.” does that stand for anything? hmm… chi, rho… chi, rho…

CAIRO!!!!

Of course, Cairo!! A famous Microsoft codename originally used for Windows NT 4.0, but also used to describe a set of technologies that didn’t all make it into 4.0. Cairo was envisioned as the ultimate operating system, and an ambitious feature set was announced, much of which took longer than expected to complete. The remaining technologies that were originally targeted for Cairo were eventually added bit by bit to all of the versions of windows between Windows NT 4.0 and Windows XP… xp being the real Cairo.

All of those technologies are now in the ultimate operating system, XP… except, of course, for the object-based file system WinFS, originally annoucned for Cairo, and recently cancelled yet again for Vista. But that’s ok, I prefer plain old file systems that store and retrieve hunks of bytes, that has always worked well for me. Perhaps whoever chose the name XP decided that Windows XP was finally close enough to the Cairo vision to be called Chi-rho.

Ah, my machine has booted finally… my Windows chi-rho, cairo, xp machine… now, time to get to work. But, on second thought, I guess I have time to type up a blog entry before really digging in…