If you poke around the various icon resources included in Windows 7 DLLs you will find some really old images that have been around since the early days Windows. Some of these icons represent devices such as phones and mobile music players which are looking pretty out dated by today’s standards. According to WikiPedia the Kinect was launched in North America in November of 2010 
and publicly announced June 1st 2009. The Windows 7 Beta first appeared in December 2008 and officially in January 2009. Included in the installation of Windows 7 is a DLL named mmres.dll which has a number of icon resources embedded. While digging through the icons I found one that looked familiar and eerily like a Kinect device. The screenshot below is looking at the mmres.dll from the Windows 7 Beta dated 12-12-2008. As you can see we knew what the Kinect, or Natal as it was first called, at least 6 months before it was publically announced!
