Nitpick: ME came before XP.
Also, it’s more complicated and crazier than you’re letting on.
That new policy, which I remember reading about at the time 7 came out.
There was a Windows 1.0 and a Windows 2.0. They were clunky and I don’t personally know anyone who actually used them, but they did exist. Windows 3.0 and 3.1 is where most folks started jumping on the bandwagon.
At that point, Microsoft did a split. They created Windows NT, and since Windows was version 3 they made NT version 3 also (3.1, and later 3.5 and 3.51). One of the core features of NT was that it didn’t let programs directly access the hardware. This made the OS more stable but also broke most games and home applications that relied on directly accessing the hardware so that they weren’t as slow as a snail on sedatives. NT was better for multitasking, since misbehaving programs were less able to trash the entire OS. Plain old vanilla Windows was better for home use, where users typically ran a single programs and needed performance over stability. Multitasking was better suited to business apps.
Next came Windows 4, only instead of calling it Windows 4, the marketing guys got a hold of it and called it Windows 95 instead. The corresponding NT version came out, and just to be consistent (ahem) they called it NT 4. Things like this make some folks certain that there is a guy in charge of obfuscation working somewhere for Microsoft. Windows 4.1 was called Windows 98.
At Windows version 5, Microsoft decided that maintaining two separate operating systems (Windows and Windows NT) was a royal pain in the butt, so they decided that everyone was going to run Windows NT from here on out. There was just going to be one OS and it was going to be called Windows 2000. And part way through development they realized that most home apps just wouldn’t run on the darn thing and they immediately scrapped that idea, making Windows 2000 for business. This meant that they needed something to sell the home folks, so they made Windows (not NT) version 4.9, which they called ME. And to make Windows ME, all they did was basically take Windows 98 and fiddle with some of the spiffy new apps that were supposed to go into the home version of Windows 2000 so that they would run on a Windows 4.x operating system. Needless to say, ME was a hastily released piece of junk, and it quickly got a reputation for being just that.
Microsoft still wanted to get rid of that pesky Windows OS and just run NT, so they tried again. They took Windows 2000, made a spiffy new user interface for it, and called it XP. It wasn’t really much better at running old Windows apps than 2000 was (it was really mostly the same OS under the hood), but users had been given a couple of years to get new apps and developers were long aware that Windows was going bye-bye, so by the time XP came out most folks were ready for the transition to NT, and there we have stayed ever since. Windows is dead. NT forever.
Vista was Windows NT 6.0. Windows 7 was of course NT 7.0. Right? Uh, well, no it isn’t. That would make to much sense. Windows 7 is actually NT 6.1. And Windows 8 is NT 6.2. Seriously, Microsoft? So apparently the obfuscation guy didn’t lose his job when they went back to numbering things. I think he may have actually gotten a promotion.
So here’s the real list of Windows operating systems (at least the major versions):
Windows:
1.0 Windows 1.0
2.0 Windows 2.0
3.0 Windows 3.0
3.1 Windows 3.1
4.0 Windows 95
4.1 Windows 98
4.9 Windows ME
Windows NT:
3.1 Windows NT 3.1
3.51 Windows NT 3.51
4.0 Windows NT 4.0
5.0 Windows 2000
5.1 Windows XP
6.0 Windows Vista
6.1 Windows 7
6.2 Windows 8
Blue Screen of Death = The Stop Screen
This is its correct name I believe.