the answers are everywhere, but I am having some trouble putting everything together.

I am vurious as to why development of what we now know as Longhorn was stopped, and why they started working "Vista". I know later builds became unstable, and features were starting to become a mess, but why didn't they just fix that up? they basically let a few years of development go down the drain, and they released an operating system that wishes it could even be compared to "Longhorn". why didn't Microsoft just keep working on longhorn?

Longhorn is/was the codename for Vista. The only thing that they did was change the base of the code from XP to Server 2003 (a much better base).

Basically the original XP-based builds are really nothing more than XP with a few extra goodies thrown in, while the 2003-based builds are more feature/interface complete.

I understand the whole codename thing, but I understand that there was a "reset" when they changed over to the new code base. I wanted to know why they did that because they had to re-do everything, and a lot of awesome features were lost.

The original builds weren't XP based, rather pre-release server based. The change merely brought the RTM (SP1 I think) server core

but what actually caused the change? so many awesome things were lost! the gui was SO MUCH BETTER

You already said it, this caused the change:




Longhorn was something like a "playground", the developers added a lot of things and experimented with Longhorn, but they hadn't set themselves a goal I think. Then Longhorn was too unstable and they decided to change the codebase and begun from the beginning.

The builds were unstable, etc. But still. The Longhorn concept was a great one and I do not understand why did they completely change their course by 180 degrees to make the piece of crap known as Vista. That concept was surely possible to code.

thats what I was getting at here. surely it was possible to fix it up, there were so many great ideas that never got implemented into "Vista"...

of course it was/is possible to fix them up, but much eaiser and faster to start over and not do the same mistakes.

I think if you ever use 4093, you will quickly realise that Longhorn got bad very fast towards the end. It was probably for the best, though they could have tried to keep some of the Longhorn features

Yeah, the project was bad organised.
But some good ideas went to trash with the project and nobody knows why...

if you asked for when, it's August 04

it's sad that everyone saw 4074 and was excited about it.
They no news came for MS for another year.
When we all checked out 5048, everyone was surprisingly disappointed.

what base is 3718 built on ?

The last build I actually installed on my computer was 4074... I couldn't run any of the others (Old PC).

I haven't tried to install any other builds on my new pc... Should I even bother?

What I understand is that the Server builds and Longhorn builds were developed almost together when Longhorn was in its 3718 branch, as they updated the Longhorn kernel with the latest Server code, so Longhorn 3718 would have been built on Server Build 3718. This is shown by the fact the Server build was built about 1 week before the Longhorn build.

thats because Lab06 builds are behind the main builds
3718 was based on XP SP1 and so was Server 2003