Earlier today I came across an article of Paul Thurrott’s regarding the apparently new kernel work Microsoft has been doing in preparation for Windows 7. He points out that MinWin is not a new technology, but merely a continuation of the compartmentalization  MS had developed for Vista and Windows Server 2008. Since this story caught on on many news sites and blogs alike (mine included), I thought I’d set the record straight, whereas I too pushed the publish button without double-checking the facts.

Read all about the true MinWin over at Paul Thurrott’s SuperSite for Windows.

Windows Vista has merely been out for a year and there’s already talk of Windows 7.

Actually, I hadn’t expected this to happen to quickly, but it’s positive that Microsoft is letting people in on there scheme. Last week, Eric Traut discussed Windows 7 for the very first time, along with the core kernel of future Windows versions, which is called MinWin. The latter is - according to Traut - actually very streamlined, in contrast with Windows Vista. MinWin occupies 25MB of disk space and nearly 40MB of RAM. It doesn’t have a graphical interface though, at this point it’s only usable as a text prompt. Furthermore, there are no commercial plans with this kernel, as it’ll only be used to spawn applications based on Windows (and in the end Windows 7 itself).

The original video was pretty lengthy (about an hour) and pretty dull, too. Long Zheng from istartedsomething.com gracefully clipped out the interesting part, about Windows 7, MinWin and previous versions of Windows - all the way back to Windows 1.0.

A pretty slick ASCII bootscreen.

Watch video at istartedsomething.com