Running Skype on 4 operating systems - on 1 desktop

Skype's Jaanus Kase obviously has way too much free time on his hands. On a whim, he decided to see if he could get all four versions of Skype (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and Windows Mobile) running on one machine.

So he fired up Parallels on his Mac and set up two virtual machines, one to run Linux, the other for Windows. And inside of the Windows machine, he used Microsoft's Device Emulator to load a virtual Windows Mobile device.

The verdict? You can sit around and talk to yourself for hours on end. The Windows Mobile version didn't play as nicely as some of the others, but it's likely that this is because of the emulator rather than the Skype client. After all, we're talking about an emulator running inside of an emulator, on a machine that's running a grand total of four operating systems simultaneously.

Is there any rational reason why you might want to replicate this experiment at home? Of course not. But it's still pretty cool. What other programs can you think of that might be able to run in this environment?

[via Skype Journal]

Tags: cross-platform, emulation, operating systems, OperatingSystems, skype, virtualization