What is Windows 7?
Windows has had a long history, complicated by there being two completely separate product lines sharing the same name. The original Windows started off as a graphical shell on top of MS-DOS and ended up incorporating DOS as its boot-loader. The second line, originally called Windows NT, began as an offshoot of the IBM and Microsoft joint project to create OS/2. The next version of Windows will be called Windows 7, but as we find out, that’s not necessarily an accurate version number.
Windows 7 – 2009 or 2010
So we get to the next version of Windows. Again, what was planned to be a major rewrite has been scaled back. Microsoft has stated that Vista’s successor (NT 6.1, but really, it’s 3.4 underneath) will be based on the same base as Vista and Server 2008, so there’s no big rewrite underneath - thus, it’s not really version 7.0. Windows Server 2008 has been far better-received than Vista, so this is the Windows’ team’s attempt to sort and fix Vista. It’s really NT 6.1, as the version numbers of the preview releases attest. Or, if you’re counting from the first version of NT in 1993, it’s something like v3.4.