I'm too young for Cairo, but I do remember Longhorn and WinFS, and indeed the marketing and ideas of those have shaped my view of what the systems could/should be today. Didn't BeOS also have some sort of object-database-filesystem-thingy? I remember some chatter about that, but didn't actually catch any first-hand experience at the time.

edit: Longhorn concept video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b9ifQvQCO7Y

Nevertheless, consider watching Gates' Comdex keynote videos.

Have you seen the WinFS trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZ_4p5iUc88

You can try out BeOS open source successor that comes with a BeFS compatibility called HaikuOS. I suggest you to read the BeFS book written by the main developer who later developed the Spotlight search engine for MacOSX 10.4+ and later iOS. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HaikuOS , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BeFS , http://www.nobius.org/~dbg/practical-file-system-design.pdf , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spotlight_(software)

Both NTFS and the newer ReFS (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReFS ) offer almost equal capabilities to BeFS. And it's a real shame that Microsoft hasn't been able to come up with a decent GUI. Even Vista had a better advanced search dialog integration than the successor's Windows 7 and 8.x