* Windows Vista: How to get Beta 1 and a likely shipping schedule
If one more pundit, one more reporter or one more half-wit writes or says “Hasta la Vista, Windows!” to me, I’ll scream so loud that they’ll here me in Latvia where – these same humorists will tell you – “vista” means “chicken.”
“Vista,” in case you’ve been in a locked room with no windows, no power and no batteries for a week, is the official, shipping and marketing name for the next version of Windows desktop software, what we’ve come to know and loathe, er love, as “Longhorn” http://www.networkworld.com/news/2005/072205-vista.html?rl.
Some background: Windows came in numbered versions for almost 10 years: Versions 1, 2 and 3 right up through 3.11. Next came Windows NT, which started at Version 3.5 and went up all the way to Version 4. At that point, Microsoft switched – still using numbers, but 2- and 4-digit ones that looked like years: Windows 95, 98, 2000, and 2003 (some applications, such as Microsoft Office, also came in a “97” version).
Tiring of that, the great minds in Redmond again switched, to two-alphabetic characters: Windows ME and Windows XP. Now, it appears, that another switch has occurred, to something that most closely resembles a codename. Remember “Chicago,” “Nashville,” “Acrylic,” “Whitehorse,” “Blackcomb,” “Whistler”?
Dutch MCSE Steven Bink https://bink.nu/Home.bink has collected what he claims is the most complete list on the Internet of Microsoft codenames at http://bink.nu/Default.aspx?tabindex=3&tabid=8 and it does include a few that I don’t remember (Onion? Kato?). “Vista” would fit right in with this list. Ten years from now, we may have difficulty remembering if “Vista” was the marketing name for “Longhorn” or vice-versa.
But the bottom line isn’t about the name. The bottom line is that Longhorn is finally shipping in a “sort of public” Beta 1 version http://www.networkworld.com/news/2005/072605-vista-beta.html?rl which indicates that the shipping release shouldn’t be more than six to nine months away, with a public preview sometime in between. I say “sort of public” because Beta 1 is available to a large group of people but you have to be a member of the Microsoft Developer network (MSDN) or a subscriber to Microsoft TechNet in order to get your hands on a copy right now https://www.microsoft.com/technet/windowsvista/evaluate/betadist.mspx.
Information on Vista https://www.microsoft.com/technet/windowsvista is much more than what was available when it was still called Longhorn, and should become more plentiful as we approach the shipping date.
If you can get Beta 1 by all means do so. Put it in a lab machine that’s not attached to your production network and run it through its paces. But we’ve still got a ways to go before it’s shipping and even longer before it’s ready for your users, so you can afford to be patient right now.
