TechWeb has a listing of Windows minimum system requirements from 1990 to 2006, starting at Windows 3.0 and culminating with Windows Vista. It's fun to browse through it and take a trip down memory lane, but in particular I'm interested to note that in terms of processing horsepower, by far the biggest jump happens between Windows XP and Windows Vista, particularly if you take the video processing requirements into account.

Now there are some pretty good excuses reasons for this, the best of which being that most of the operating systems on the list were released within about 2 years of each other, with the exception of Windows 3.0 and Windows 95. Hopefully this is also a sign that Microsoft is starting to take minimum system requirements more seriously though. Historically, Microsoft lists minimum system requirements that nobody in their right mind would actually use to run Windows. This was somewhat ironic, given that the XP in Windows XP was supposed to stand for 'experience'. Maybe this time around Microsoft is trying to disappoint less people by being more up-front about what will be required to run Vista. Here's hoping.