As planned/expected, yesterday at the BUILD conference in Anaheim, California Microsoft has revealed a developer preview version of Windows 8. Claimed to be a reimagining of Windows, Microsoft's upcoming operating system consumes less memory than Windows 7, it boots faster thanks to the fast startup mode, and features updated versions of Task Manager and Windows Explorer, a built-in app store, support for both touch and keyboard/mouse navigation, Internet Explorer 10, and the new Metro style UI which is specifically designed for touch-enabled devices (the OS will be able to run both "regular" desktop apps and Metro style apps).
Microsoft has already made available for download the Developer Preview version here - both 32-bit and 64-bit ISO images are provided, and the system requirements for this first public Windows 8 build are:
* a 1 GHz or faster processor
* 1GB of RAM for 32-bit, 2GB of RAM for 64-bit
* 16GB of drive space (32-bit) or 20GB (64-bit)
* a DirectX 9 graphics card
