Minute-by-minute summary of Windows XP keynote
0:00 - The keynote begins with Bill Gates welcoming the audience and talking about the future of computing
4:25 - A video introducing Windows XP is played, highlighting the new features and improvements from previous versions
9:50 - Jim Allchin takes the stage and talks about the design and development of XP, emphasizing ease of use and stability
17:30 - A demonstration of XP’s new user interface and features is given, including the taskbar, new start menu, and improved file management
33:00 - A demo of Microsoft’s new Media Player 8 is given, showing its handling of all the common media types
44:10 - Allchin returns to the stage and talks about the security work in XP
57:30 - A demo of XP’s new networking tools is given, highlighting improvements in compatibility and ease of setup
1:07:00 - Gates returns to the stage and sums up the keynote, talking about how XP is a big step forward for computing and how it will benefit businesses, consumers, and developers alike.
The thing the keynote undersold
XP launched on 25 October 2001 at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square, six weeks after the September 11 attacks, which is why the event was smaller and more subdued than the Windows 95 circus. Madonna’s “Ray of Light” carried the advertising.
The important part is architectural and it barely gets stage time. Until XP, Microsoft shipped two separate operating systems: the consumer 9x line, descended from DOS, and the NT line, built from scratch with a real kernel, a proper security model and protected memory. Windows Me was the last of the DOS lineage and it was not a happy ending. XP is the merger: the consumer edition running on the NT kernel, version 5.1, for the first time. Everything people remember about XP being stable compared to 98 comes from that single decision.
The rest of the feature list follows from having a real kernel underneath. Fast user switching needs separate sessions. Remote Desktop and Remote Assistance need a multi-session terminal services stack, which NT had and 9x could not have had. System Restore needs volume snapshots. Side-by-side assemblies, which finally gave two applications a way to use different versions of the same DLL, need an OS that can be strict about what it loads.
Two corrections to the summary above. XP had no User Account Control; that arrived with Vista in 2007, and in fact the default XP user was an Administrator, which is a large part of the malware story that followed. What XP shipped was the Internet Connection Firewall, and it was switched off by default until Service Pack 2 in 2004 turned it on and renamed it Windows Firewall. The other new arrival nobody on stage dwelt on was Windows Product Activation, the first time a Microsoft desktop release phoned home to validate itself, and easily the most contentious thing in the box.
Video demonstration of someone else ring testing: