Dean Takahashi, author of The Xbox 360 Uncloaked is looking for information on a project within Microsoft that was codenamed “Helium.” He has an internal e-mail dated from 2003, that describes a project that would have Windows running on the Xbox 360, which would supposedly have been a third SKU for the console. A commenter notes that the author of the e-mail, Jon Thomason worked on the Xbox software team, and supposedly moved to Windows development in 2004 before leaving Microsoft entirely.

The element Helium is in the same family on the periodic table as Xenon; both are noble gasses. Xenon, of course, was the code name for the Xbox 360 CPU. Helium, in the periodic table, is “above” Xenon, and is the lightest of the noble gasses; could this have been a lightweight or smaller footprint version of Vista to run on the Xbox 360? Since little information has surfaced between the original e-mail and today, and the Xbox 360 launch has come and gone, it seems unlikely that such a project is still a going concern. Still, one can speculate on how this might have changed things in the console arena, had the project seen the light of day.

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