So it starts at 3, then there are three different fours?
And in true Microsoft fashion, there were two different versions of Windows 2: Windows/286 and Windows/386.
My theory is that it’s to lower expectations. Windows is kind of the opposite of Star Trek movies - the odd numbers (mostly XP and 7) are good, and the even numbers are bad. So Windows 9 would have been good but we’re skipping it and going straight to 10, which should be expected to be bad. So now if it’s even mediocre it will be seen as good.
Right?
You mean it could suck harder than Windows 8???
I just read somewhere that it will be called Windows 10 for all versions (desktop, mobile, etc.), so it’s a way of unifying all the different versions under one name.
It’s awful but also not unheard of.
The version number legacy thing is demonstrably false. Old versions of windows report their marketing name (I.e. windows 98) and their formal internal version number.
Recent versions of windows, when queried for the marketing name, just return ‘Microsoft Windows’
Thus, if win9 was going to break legacy software, windows 7 and 8 (and possibly vista and xp) would already have been causing the same problem for years.
Windows 9 is rumored to be a free update for some Windows 8 users. There will be a small fee to upgrade from Windows 7 and Windows 8 OEM if this is true.
Time for some clarification of Microsoft’s naming and numbering.
Yes, there was a Windows 1 and a Windows 2. But most folks didn’t care, so we’ll ignore them for now. Most people discovered that Windows existed in version 3. There was version 3, then 3.1 which had some enhancements. No biggie.
Then Microsoft came out with Windows NT 3. The version that most folks actually used was 3.51 (there were other versions).
So far, so good. Everything uses simple version numbers. The important thing here that all of the previous lists here have wrong is that there are now two different operating systems, Windows, and Windows NT. These operating systems have the same basic user interface, but structurally they are very different. Windows NT has what is called the Hardware Abstraction Layer, or HAL. Since this is a new thing invented for NT, the older Windows doesn’t have it.
What the HAL does is it prevents programs from directly accessing the hardware. This stops misbehaving programs from completely trashing the machine and makes the entire computer much more stable. Unfortunately, the HAL also comes with a lot of overhead. This means that it is too slow for people to play games on a HAL type operating system. HAL also tends to totally bork backwards compatibility, as it prevents older software from accessing the hardware directly, which a lot of software did back then for speed.
So, since the HAL is great for multitasking environments, and business apps don’t necessarily hog every CPU cycle they can get, NT gets marketed for business, and Windows remains the “home” operating system. Home users don’t multitask so much, so no biggie there.
Next comes Windows 4. The marketing folks at Microsoft decides to become experts in obfuscation, and they decide to call the WIndows version Windows 95. They later make some improvements to it and call it Windows 98. Really, it’s 4.0 and 4.1.
Meanwhile, on the NT side of things, it just gets called NT 4.0. Boring.
Now Microsoft gets tired of maintaining two separate operating systems, so they decided to “merge” their operating system lines. You can’t merge an OS without a HAL with an OS that has a HAL. Either it has the HAL or it doesn’t. What Microsoft was really doing was killing off the Windows line and forcing everyone to NT. Since this was for home use, the obfuscation marketing group got to name it, and they called it Windows 2000. It identifies itself as NT 5.0, and that’s what it really is. Halfway through development though, they realized that the HAL still borked backwards compatibility, and there was a lot of home software out there that just wasn’t going to run on 2000. So Microsoft, seeing a disaster in the making, quickly switched gears. 2000 became for businesses only.
This left Microsoft with a problem. They didn’t have anything to sell to their home customers. So they took a bunch of the multimedia apps they had originally developed for NT 5 (Windows 2000) and ported them back to Windows 98, and called the new thing Windows ME. As you’d expect from something that was rushed out the door, it was a total piece of crap. But it’s basically Windows (not NT, just WIndows) version 4.9.
Microsoft next gave NT a facelift, but they didn’t really change much under the hood. However, since most folks think the OS is mostly the user interface, this gave customers the impression that they had come out with a whole new OS. Microsoft called it XP. It’s really NT 5.1, just a minor improvement to 5.0. At this point, Microsoft completed their “merge” (aka killing off Windows). Note that XP really wasn’t much better at backwards compatibility, even though it had a few extra settings in it for compatibility that were supposed to do something useful. However, by then all of the software developers knew that everything was heading to NT, so all of the recent software that most folks used worked under NT. So the merge was completed, and the Windows line was dead forever.
From here on out, everything is Windows NT.
Vista was NT 6. Microsoft tried to force everyone to buy fancy new computers, and made an OS that ran like a snail on sedatives on older hardware. Most folks decided that Vista was a total piece of crap, and many folks skipped it entirely, if possible.
Microsoft needed to fix their newest version of NT. They also needed to distance themselves as much as possible from Vista’s bad reputation. So they fixed everything, tweaked the user interface (because again, that makes people think that they made a whole new OS even though they didn’t), and they called their new creation Windows 7. Ironically, Windows 7 isn’t NT version 7.0. It’s NT 6.1. So the obfuscation guys in Microsoft’s marketing department clearly haven’t lost their jobs even though the company switched back to (supposedly) simple numbering of operating systems again.
So the next version of Windows was Windows 8. Again, this wasn’t a completely new OS from scratch, despite Microsoft selling it that way. All they really did was take Windows 7 and make it for tablets. Most of the changes were to the user interface only. But because it looked like a whole new OS, they called it Windows 8. It’s actually NT 6.2.
So the real list is:
Windows:
Windows Version 1
Windows Version 2
Windows Version 3 (also 3.1)
Windows 95 (Windows 4.0)
Windows 98 (Windows 4.1)
Windows ME (Windows 4.9)
Windows NT
NT version 3 (3.1, 3.51, etc)
NT version 4
Windows 2000 (NT 5.0)
Windows XP (NT 5.1)
Windows Vista (NT 6.0)
Windows 7 (NT 6.1)
Windows 8 (NT 6.2)
Windows 8.1 (NT 6.3)
So, what’s Windows 10? NT 6.4, of course. Seriously. It is.
I didn’t arbitrarily assign numbers to the above list. Those numbers (NT 5.0 for 2000 for example) are the version numbers that the operating systems identify themselves with. These numbers are actually quite good at helping you sort through what Microsoft actually changed. A major version number change means deep structural changes, so you can expect device drivers not to work and you can expect more compatibility differences. Minor version changes are more user interface types of things. You can expect most of the stuff under the hood to still work the same. Drivers made for 2000 usually work on XP, for example, but may not work on Vista or later. Drivers made for Vista will probably work on everything later including the new Windows 10 when it comes out.
I do almost swear that Microsoft has a guy in their marketing department whose job is to obfuscate this stuff as much as possible. He was hired in 1995 and still works there.
Here’s a somewhat prescient April Fool’s joke.
I think they should just number their software releases by the release year, like they’ve started doing with Office.
If you think the way Microsoft version numbers their OS releases, you should see how camera companies assign model names/numbers to their gear. For Canon, the bigger the number, the cheaper the camera (their flagship camera has been the Canon 1D Mark whatever the hell since some time around the turn of the century).
Those came after Windows 2. And then each had their own update. Their version numbers were 2.1X for X=0,1. I ran Windows 2 on a 8086 processor with 1Meg of memory.
This is pretty much what I think, too. They are even going for a model that is more like OS X. If they are smart, they will jump the internal version numbers as well.
What, 640K was not enough?
:dubious:Is this a whoosh? Surely programmers use base 8 or, more often, 16.
Base 2, strictly speaking. If you pay attention, most computer-related numbers tend to be multiples of 2. 2 4 6 8 16 32 64 128 256 512 1024 etc.
And it tries to kill you. 
Don’t they still use version numbers though, so it’s pretty much the same issue?
I don’t have 2013, but go into Program Files in 2010 and it’s the \Office14\ directory. A google suggests that \Office15\ exists in 2013. So it could be worse: does Office 13 refer to 2013 or 2007?
Visual Basic (and probably some of Studio) had this too. Luckily v10 happened to match up to 2010 and provide an “anchor point” to remember which is which and whether someone means 2008 (v9) or v8 (2005). Version 7 (“2002”) was a big change over 6 and the first to use a year. The post-6 versions are often referred to as VB.NET instead of just VB, and like Win1-3, only the last version is remembered. There are still some people who cling to the old one.
Base 8, or octal, is pretty uncommon anymore, machine-level programmers use base 16, or hexadecimal (though most assembly-level code is written with label and symbol words and sometimes numeric values in whatever base is convenient for expressing the value – proper form is to #define constants in a header, where they can be easily altered or converted into variables).
I guess MS should really call this version Windows 0x0A.
Doesn’t matter what they call it, it’s still Windows all the way down.
Freaking 2kb limit to the stinking PATH variable in the 21st century. How absurd.