For anyone really curious about this, 1, 2, 3, 95 and 98 are using the old MS-DOS Kernel. Windows 3 was the first product also released with an alternative new NT Kernel and available as Windows 3 NT.
So then when they continued with this NT Kernel they continued to count the version number like that (at least retrospectively when creating Windows 7).
This is a myth. The Win32 API doesn’t even have a method that returns the string “Windows 95”! Windows version numbers are numbers, not strings. Windows 95 was actually 4.0. Windows 98 was 4.1, ME was 4.5, and XP was 5.0.
Actually it’s not entirely a myth - there was some Java library that did this - but it wasn’t widespread at all, and certainly not the documented approach to check the version.
Close but not exactly. Windows 5 was 2000, Windows 5.1 was Windows XP.
But it’s more confusing than that because of the two different lines: the MS-DOS based line which covered Windows 1.0 through ME, and the multi-user NT line for workstations and servers which adopted the same version numbers as the currently released MS-DOS line that was available at the same time. I.E. windows NT 3.1 used the windows 3.1 UI from the DOS line, but was New-Technology instead of DOS under the hood. NT4 used the DOS based win95 UI, and NT5 was Windows 2000 also with the familiar Windows 9x UI. Everything since XP has been exclusively NT under the hood.
Lmao they only considered 95 > 98 > ME to be minor version updates? They didn’t even deserve their own major version? Although it’s probably pretty accurate, I remember 98 basically just being a slightly updated 95. I never used ME so no idea with that. It’s still pretty funny though.
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