Microsoft Windows 7 revealed

Still hesitating about the big move to Vista? Maybe you're best off waiting for Windows 7, the successor to Vista, which Microsoft is already hard at work on. Where's the proof? Long Zheng, the Australian hacker behind the blog istartedsomething, has posted a clip from what seems to be the first public demonstration of the forthcoming operating system. Sure, it's not scheduled to be released until 2010, but still, when it arrives, it'll be super neat-and well worth the wait! Let's cros our fingers that the software is not bloated as always since the kernel has been stripped down to only 25MB.

So what can be gleaned from the video? The portion Zheng highlights is a discussion of the Windows 7 core, which turns out to be a relatively lean machine. In it, engineer Eric Traut shows off a streamlined app called MinWin, not a product itself but probably the basis for future products, he points out. The Windows 7 source code is about 25MB on disk, an interesting comparison to the 4GB that the full Windows Vista takes up. Oh, and there's no graphical system yet, which explains the ASCII logo.

There's also an interesting walk through the history of Microsoft's operating systems. You knew Vista was OS 6, right? And that XP was 5, and NT 4.0 was 4, and Windows 3.1 ... well, you get the picture. If Windows 7 doesn't interest you, watch the clip for a quick walkthrough of Windows 2 and 1 as well.

Source: http://www.istartedsomething.com/20071019/eric-talk-demo-windows-7-minwin/