Have you heard of MinWin yet?
On October 13, Eric Traut from the Core Virtual Machine Team at Microsoft’s Core OS Division, gave a presentation about the vritualization technology Microsoft currently has to offer. The full presentation can be seen here and takes about an hour.
During the presentation, he talks about various versions of windows, among which Windows 7. He demonstrates the previous versions of Windows (including Windows 1.0!!!), but also shows a running version of a minimal Windows 7 Core. Microsoft calls this MinWin and contains only the core components of the new Windows version. The core takes up about 25Mb (!!!) of diskspace and is capable of running in 40Mb of memory. Microsoft does not see a commercial future for this product. The section where he talks about the various windows versions and minwin can be viewed here. It was fun seeing those older versions of Windows again!