Windows 2000 — NT 5.0 Renamed, With Active Directory for Business

Windows 2000 was released on 17 February 2000 (a Thursday) in the United States and worldwide, and the Japanese editions of Professional and Server went on sale on 18 February 2000 (a Friday). Microsoft announced general availability in San Francisco on 17 February, making Windows 2000 Professional, Server and Advanced Server available that day in more than 60 countries and 16 languages. Japanese, in two versions, was among the 16, so Japan was in the first wave; the boxes reached Japanese shops the next day.

Windows 2000 was not the successor to the consumer Windows 98. It succeeded Windows NT 4.0, the business line, and was called "Windows NT 5.0" during development. Dropping NT from the name said a good deal about where Microsoft meant to take it.

Dates up to release

The Datacenter Server date is from Wikipedia. At RTM, Microsoft expected Datacenter Server about 90 to 120 days after general availability.

From NT 5.0 to Windows 2000

In its release of 27 October 1998, Microsoft renamed the products as follows.

In the same release Jim Allchin, senior vice president of the personal and business systems group, said "Windows NT will be the basis for all Microsoft PC operating systems from consumer products to the highest-performance servers." From that day it was public policy that the consumer line running through Windows 95 and 98 would eventually give way to NT. Windows 98 and NT 4.0 kept their names, though, and the consumer line had one more release, Windows Me, before it ended.

The release also said Windows 2000 products would carry the tag line "Built on Windows NT technology", so the NT name did not vanish entirely. On launch day, a CompUSA executive quoted in Microsoft's release still introduced Windows 2000 Professional as the newest Windows NT platform.

Active Directory

The largest addition in Windows 2000 was Active Directory, in the server editions. It kept users, computers, printers and other resources in a single directory for central management, replacing the domains of NT 4.0.

A month after launch, a review in FCW, the US government IT magazine, called Active Directory the most touted feature of Windows 2000 Server. In directory services, the review said, Microsoft had trailed Novell and Banyan for years, and Active Directory was its first attempt to combine the breadth of NT with a capable enterprise directory. Where NT 4.0 had capped a domain at 40,000 accounts, Active Directory brought it to the millions-of-objects level. The review also warned that some benefits arrived only in "native mode", after every domain controller in a domain had been upgraded to Windows 2000 Server, which could be a long way off for organisations with many older clients.

Wikipedia lists NTFS 3.0 and the Encrypting File System (EFS) among Windows 2000's other new features.

The Japanese launch: a quiet midnight

On 24 December 1999 Microsoft's Japanese subsidiary said the Japanese Professional and Server had been completed on 22 December and would go on sale as planned on 18 February 2000; the Japanese Advanced Server was expected on 3 March. According to PC Watch, about 70,000 people had registered for the RC2 test version within two weeks. The version upgrade from Windows NT 4.0 had an estimated retail price of 16,800 yen.

Akihabara held its customary midnight sales on launch day, but AKIBA PC Hotline! described them as rather subdued next to the Windows 95 launch of 1995 and the Windows 98 launch of 1998. More shops took part than had been announced, yet crowds gathered only at a few large stores. The report put this down to the product being the business and power-user successor to NT 4.0 rather than to Windows 98, to the weekday-night timing, and to a clash with online pre-orders for the PlayStation 2.

What followed

Microsoft marketed Windows 2000 as the most secure Windows to that date, yet it became a target for worms such as Code Red and Nimda, according to Wikipedia; Code Red exploited a vulnerability in IIS, the Windows 2000 web server.

On the desktop, Windows XP in October 2001 merged home and business Windows on the Windows 2000 engine, carrying out the policy Allchin had stated in 1998. On the server side the successor was Windows Server 2003, in April 2003.

According to INTERNET Watch, Microsoft's support lifecycle treats 31 March 2000 as Windows 2000's start date, and mainstream support ended on 30 June 2005. Extended support, which carried the security updates, ended on 13 July 2010 (US time) for Professional, Server, Advanced Server and Datacenter Server. The same article noted that Windows 2000 was still widely used in corporate systems when support ended.

For the wider Windows lineage see the Microsoft timeline and the operating systems timeline; for the company, see Microsoft.