What was the code name for Windows 7?

Raymond Chen

A retrospective on Windows code names gave Blackcomb as the code name for Windows 7. That’s not quite correct.

The code name for Windows 7 was… Windows 7.

Windows XP was code named Whistler, which was the name of a city in British Columbia best known for its ski resort, also commonly referred to as Whistler. During this time, the code name given to “The version of Windows to come after Whistler” was Blackcomb, which is the name of a second mountain in the same resort, slightly further down the road.

However, so much work had been pushed into the Blackcomb release that it was clear that it couldn’t all be done in one release cycle, so selected portions were extracted into an interim release code named Longhorn, which is the name of a bar situated between the Whistler and Blackcomb mountains.

Longhorn was the code name for Windows Vista.

You might conclude, therefore, that Blackcomb was the code name for Windows 7.

But you’d be wrong.

So much work had been postponed into the Blackcomb project that it wasn’t so much a project as a wish list.

Whistler: Learn to play Für Elise.
Longhorn: Learn to play Träumerei.
Blackcomb: Learn to play all of Beethoven’s piano sonatas, both of Brahms’s piano concerti, and while you’re at it, Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit.

The scope of work that was marked as “Blackcomb” was so large that it was effectively meaningless.

So it was all thrown out, and a new project started from scratch.

That project was code named Windows 7, based on the fact that Windows Vista’s programmatic version number was 6.0, and since this was the version to come next, the natural choice would be to call the next version 7.0. (Though that’s not what it ultimately shipped as.)

It was generally understood that this was just a code name, and the marketing department would give it a splashy name when the time came.

And when that time came, the marketing department decided that the splashy name was just the code name we’d been using all along.

How anticlimactic.

Windows 7 released to manufacturing ten years ago today.

Topics

History

Author

Raymond Chen

Raymond has been involved in the evolution of Windows for more than 30 years. In 2003, he began a Web site known as The Old New Thing which has grown in popularity far beyond his wildest imagination, a development which still gives him the heebie-jeebies. The Web site spawned a book, coincidentally also titled The Old New Thing (Addison Wesley 2007). He occasionally appears on the Windows Dev Docs Twitter account to tell stories which convey no useful information.

13 comments

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Boris Zakharin July 23, 2019

The only time I set foot on Microsoft campus was when I interviewed for a job there in 2003 (which I did not get). There was some material there referring to the next Windows Server. I asked if that was "Blackcomb" and was told it was not. I found this curious because at the time the official story was that "Longhorn" would only be a client OS and "Blackcomb" would still be the next server release. They said that "Longhorn Server" was indeed a thing. I was pretty excited to have this bit of insider information, despite it not really...
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The only time I set foot on Microsoft campus was when I interviewed for a job there in 2003 (which I did not get). There was some material there referring to the next Windows Server. I asked if that was “Blackcomb” and was told it was not. I found this curious because at the time the official story was that “Longhorn” would only be a client OS and “Blackcomb” would still be the next server release. They said that “Longhorn Server” was indeed a thing. I was pretty excited to have this bit of insider information, despite it not really affecting me in any way. I don’t remember when the existence of “Longhorn Server” was officially announced.
As for Windows 7, I remember some confusion about what the codename was with Vienna/Seven (splled out) often being reported together.
Random chatter: Windows ME also had a codeename similar to its final release name (Milennium vs Milennium Edition)

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- Arjen Krap July 30, 2019
  
  Windows Server 2008 (Longhorn Server) was not released at the same time as Windows Vista RTM. Just like Windows Server 2003/XP x64 and Windows XP x86, but different. Windows Server 2008 SP1 was the first public non-beta version and released at the same time as Windows Vista SP1. This way Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista were build from the same code branches, unlike Windows XP x86 and Windows Server 2003/XP x64.
  However Microsoft did ran her website on Windows Server 2008 before SP1, and if I recall correctly so did a few Microsoft partners like Dell.
NTAuthority July 23, 2019

Of course, early in-development releases of Windows 7 had the beautiful branding of ‘Windows (R) Code Name “Windows 7″‘.
Flux July 22, 2019

“Blackcomb”? 🤷‍♀️ The majority of news outlets report “Vienna” to be Windows 7’s codename. Apparently, someone called Robert Scoble, who worked as an “evangelist” for Microsoft, said it.
Also, not sure what “Träumerei” or “Gaspard de la nuit” are. Never heard of Ravel or Brahms before either. Quite frankly, I know as much about music terminology as Beethoven knew about the -Recipe switch of Add-WindowsCapability in PowerShell.
- Sean Barnes July 24, 2019
  
  There was usually a codename for the version after the one that you were currently working on, so things could be postponed to that future version. So Blackcomb was originally the version after Whistler, but Longhorn got put into the middle. As that stretched on, the plans for Blackcomb were no longer meaningful. So the next version got a new codename, Vienna. By the time Longhorn was wrapping up and planning began for the next version, the accumulated Vienna plans were also no longer relevant. So by the time Windows 7 development began, the codename was “Windows 7”.
Jonathan Potter July 22, 2019

Still the best version of Windows ever 🙂