If you ever find yourself wondering why Windows takes so long to run, or marvelling at the amount of hard disk space taken up by all the bells and whistles in Windows Vista, you might find this video interesting. It shows Microsoft's Eric Traut demonstrating the oldest versions of Windows - including Windows 1, Windows 2 and the infamous Microsoft Bob, as well as a special, tiny version of Windows - MinWin - that's being developed inside Microsoft's headquarters as they work on Windows 7 (which will supercede Vista).

It's particularly interesting to see the evolution of the Notepad and Paint tools still found in Windows today - not to mention the garish user interface of Windows 1 - and geeks will appreciate the idea of a complete operating system, with a running web server, running in under 40MB of memory. Also, did you know that when Windows 1 was written the arrow keys found on most keyboards today had yet to be invented? Interesting stuff.