Back in mmm like 2002 or 2003 or 2004 while at Microsoft I read an internal paper from a few OS guys who hackathoned something for Bill Gates's Think Week (which is when he used to go to some island in San Juans or somewhere similar and just read curated papers and think, it was a huge prestige to get such a paper to him) and that something was an OS written from scratch with GC and memory management on top of something very .NET framework'y (which was released a couple of years ago. They had it booting on all kinds of hardware and doing various neato things. One of explicitly called design principles was 0 compatibility with anything Windows before. Which is why it didn't go anywhere I assume. I remember it was just a handful of engineers (presumably OS folks) hacking for like a month. . It was awesome to read about.
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