Enlarge / The earliest-known version of the Aero theme in a March 2003 Windows Longhorn build, nearly four years before Windows Vista’s public release. (credit: @thebookisclosed on Twitter )
If you’re interested in the history of Windows, you probably know a bit about ” Longhorn , ” Microsoft’s internal codename for the OS update that would eventually become Windows Vista. Microsoft planned a huge list of new features for Longhorn (and its planned successor, codenamed Blackcomb), many of which never saw the light of day. Longhorn was supposed to include a filesystem to replace NTFS, something we still haven’t gotten almost two decades later.
One of Vista’s most noticeable and memorable additions was the “Aero” design, which used Direct3D to draw translucent, glassy windows that could fade gracefully in and out of view, replacing the 2D windows from older Windows versions. Over the weekend, Tweets user @thebookisclosed (who makes a habit of digging deep into old development versions of Windows) gave us a look at the earliest known version of Aero in a Longhorn development build from March of the year 2003, nearly four years before Vista would be released to the particular public.
This early Aero effect looks pretty different from what we eventually got in Windows Vista—the translucency and typically the smoked-glass look are here, but the final effect as seen in Windows Vista and Windows 7 is shinier, and this blur is more pronounced. (In the Longhorn version of often the effect, the reduced blur can create readability issues if, with regard to example, the text in your title bar and text within an underlying window were to run together).
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