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Windows 2000


After the release of Windows NT 4.0 in mid-1996, Microsoft immediately began work on Windows NT 5.0 with the intention of creating a single, unified replacement for both the Windows 9x and Windows NT operating system lines. Initial estimates by the company were that NT 5.0 would be released in late 1997, but this

These plans were later delayed until NT 5.0's successor, known at the time as "Whistler"; the company chose instead to release an updated version of Windows 98 called Windows 98 Second Edition in 1999, and Windows Me in late 2000.

Microsoft changed the name to Windows 2000 on October 27, 1998. Brad Chase, a marketing director at Microsoft said the name change was intended to promote the idea that the operating system is "Year 2000 compliant", which in 1998 was a major concern for the software industry due to the Year 2000 problem. It also aligned with the recently-announced Office 2000 suite, which Microsoft intended to release at the same time as Windows 2000. Moshe Dunie was the company's vice president in charge of Windows 2000's development. At the end of 1998, he was "basically shown the door" by Steve Ballmer and replaced with Brian Valentine, who remained in the position for the next several years.

Through most of the development cycle, Microsoft produced internal builds of Windows 2000 for both Intel's Pentium and DEC's Alpha processors, partly to ensure that the operating system would work correctly on a 64-bit processor. Releases of the DEC Alpha version of Windows 2000 were provided to beta testers up until Release Candidate 1; further releases were cancelled, as Compaq (who by then had bought DEC) announced that they would no longer support Windows NT and Windows 2000 on Alpha processors. The Windows development team continued to build internal versions for the DEC Alpha even after the completion of Windows 2000 so as to ensure the 64-bit implementation would be ready for when Intel's Itanium 64-bit processor would be released.

The first beta for Windows 2000 was released in September 1997, and several further betas followed until Beta 3 which was released on 29 April 1999. From here, Microsoft issued a series of release candidates between July and November 1999, with a final "release to manufacturing" coming on 12 December 1999, and a public release on 17 February 2000. Three days before this event, which Microsoft advertised as "a standard in reliability", a leaked memo from Microsoft reported on by Mary Jo Foley revealed that Windows 2000 had "over 63,000 potential known defects". After Foley's article was published, Microsoft blacklisted her for a considerable time: InformationWeek summarized the release "our tests show the successor to NT 4.0 is everything we hoped it would be. Of course, it isn't perfect either;" Wired News later described the results of the February launch as "lackluster". Novell was critical of Microsoft's Active Directory, the new directory service architecture as less scalable, reliable, and compatible than its own Novell Directory Services alternative.

Windows 2000 was first planned to replace both Windows 98 and Windows NT 4.0.

Windows 2000 initially shipped in three editions: Professional, Server, and Advanced Server. Close to the release of Windows 2000 Service Pack 1, Microsoft released Windows 2000 Datacenter Server, targeted at large-scale computing systems with support for 32 processors, on 29 September 2000. Amongst Windows 2000's most significant new features is Active Directory, a near-complete replacement of the NT 4.0 Windows Server domain model, which built on industry-standard technologies like DNS, LDAP, and Kerberos to connect machines to one another. Terminal Services, previously only available as a separate edition of NT 4, was expanded to all server versions. A number of features from Windows 98 were incorporated as well, such as an improved Device Manager, Windows Media Player, and a revised DirectX that made it possible for the first time for many modern games to work on the NT kernel.

4,200 people were on the Windows 2000 team in the final year of its development.

On or shortly before 12 February 2004, "portions of the Microsoft Windows 2000 and Windows NT 4.0 source code were illegally made available on the Internet". The source of the leak remains unannounced. Microsoft issued the following statement: "'Microsoft source code is both copyrighted and protected as a trade secret. As such, it is illegal to post it, make it available to others, download it or use it.'" Despite the warnings, the archive containing the leaked code spread widely on the file-sharing networks. On 16 February 2004, an exploit "allegedly discovered by an individual studying the leaked source code" for certain versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer was reported.

About one million licenses of Windows 2000 were sold in its first year.

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While Windows 2000 upgrades were available for Windows 95 and Windows 98, it was not intended for home users.