It is, I told the gang, exactly five years since Microsoft announced the death of Longhorn.

Roger Howorth wrote at the time: “Many see the cancellation of Longhorn as a renaming exercise. They say the same features will come to market at about the same time as they would have before the cancellation, only now under a different version number and name.”

Whether you think Howorth was right depends a lot on how much you think you know about the history of Longhorn. I first got wind of it from a very Deep Throat developer, who revealed that it was a “first step on the way to a completely new file system” that would use SQL structures as its native format. When I asked him what that meant, he lapsed into mumbles.

Subsequent reports insisted that the SQL plan was definitely on the road map, but attempts to draw a sketch of that map made the landscape look five-dimensional. Nevertheless, many Microsoft watchers were convinced something wonderful was on the way.

To this day, I discovered, you can start a pretty heated argument among well-informed Microsoft OS followers by asking, “How much of Longhorn is left in Vista?” When the fisticuffs die down, asking “What about the latest Windows Server, then?” will re-ignite the battle.