That’s not a typo. Windows 96 promised to build on the success of Windows 95, yet it never materialized as originally intended.
I only learned about this a few months ago. To me, this was an incredibly fascinating discovery and wanted to write about & share it.
I do kinda wish we had gotten WinFS. All the “ideas” of it seemed cool, just impossible to implement without breaking every existing application.
FS?
As in “F’ing Shit”?
Future Storage aka WinFS. It was a cool idea, metadata based relational db file system. But the execution was horrible, SQL Server based file system which was exposed via .NET IIRC.
Desktop search was supposed to be revolutionized, but it was scrapped just before Vista was released
If I recall, it was a new file system. So instead if folders, every file would just kind of have tags and could be dynamically grouped like that. I could very well be wrong, but I remember being excited for it.
Can we please have a FUSE FS like this?
I was curious, so I found this: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3263036/file-system-that-uses-tags-rather-than-folders
One of the projects they mention is tagfs, which sounds like it does what you want: http://github.com/marook/tagfs
If Windows is (was) good at anything, it’s maintaining backwards compatibility for longer than anyone expects them to. Never mind revolutionizing their entire file system, Windows 11 is still backwards-compatible with batch files written before we had folders.