Posted on 10/24/2009 7:34:16 PM PDT by SeekAndFind
Windows 7, the new version of Microsoft Windows and the successor to Windows Vista, is officially released in two days time. On his blog, my good friend Patrick Crozier has asked a possibly not very important question, specifically
I've heard of Windows 3.1. I am about to a lot about Windows 7. But I've never heard a peep about Windows 4, 5 or 6. Were they, by any chance, really good versions of Windows that we never got to hear about because the praise for them was drowned out by complaints about 95, 98, 2000, Millenium and Vista?
I think we should be told.
The simple answer is of course that 95, 98, 2000, Millenium and Vista were Windows 4, 5 and 6, although not necessarily in that order. Microsoft decided in 1995 to abandon product numbers on many of its products, and replace them with names consisting of the years in which the product was released. Since then, they have released products with names consisting of product numbers, years, two letter codes that might or might not means something, and words that might or might not have anything to do with what the product is supposed to do, with versions of the same product seemingly seldom ever using the same convention twice.
If you ask Microsoft's PR department, they will tell you that Windows 95/98/ME were Windows 4, Windows 2000 was Windows 5.0, Windows XP was Windows 5.1, and Windows Vista was Windows 6.0, which it appears to make a certain amount of sense to follow with Windows 7.
However, it is of course more complex than that, and I am going to attempt to explain it. Reading the rest of this post is unlikely to improve your life in any way, although it will teach you something about the mindset of Microsoft and/or that of nerds in general. Madness may lie at the end of it. However, here we go anyway.
Microsoft has always used version numbers internally. You can find out the version number ("build number") of any version of Windows by looking in the registry for a key named "CurrentVersion", and the numbers given by Microsoft PR above are approximately those you will find if you check this for those versions of Windows.
Windows 1 and 2 were products that Microsoft sold before Windows 3, and they didn't work very well and were not very successful. It was and perhaps still is a golden rule that Microsoft products didn't work properly until the third major release, and that certainly was the case with Windows.
Windows 3.0 came in around 1990 and was very successful and was quickly updated to 3.1, which was the first widely used version of Windows. Windows 3.11 had more networking features, and Windows 3.2 existed, but was only available in Chinese.
For the next major release, Microsoft decided to name the product after the year rather than give it a version number, and thus we got Windows 95. This was version number 4.0. (Actually, 4.0.950, but everything after the second decimal point is really only of interest to the developers and I will ignore those from here on unless it is helpful not to). Two and a half years later Windows 95 was replaced with Windows 98, and this was Windows 4.10.1998, followed by Windows 98SE, which was Windows 4.10.2222. One must remember that in those days, the practice of software regularly upgrading itself over the internet had not arrived yet, so 98SE is similar to what would later have been called a service pack and not got a new build number at all.
The final version of DOS based Windows was Windows ME, which was Windows 4.90 and was released in 2000. At this point, Microsoft decided to sometimes but not always replace years with two letter names. Lord only knows why.
To understand what happened next, we need to go back a bit. In the early 1990s, Microsoft decided that its existing codebase, which was ultimately based on something a guy named Tim Paterson knocked up in a weekend in 1980, was not sophisticated enough for server applications, and decided that a more robust system was necessary. Microsoft hired some operating system experts from DEC, and they developed another operating system that was theoretically for servers, although Microsoft undoubtedly always had ambitions that its reach would be wider than that. This was Windows NT. The first version of this was ready for release in July 1993. Microsoft did not want their server OS to have a lower version number than their then current client OS, and so the first available version of Windows NT was given version number 3.1. It may also be that they wanted to try to avoid the "Microsoft products don't work until version 3" problem, so for this product they dispensed with versions 1 and 2. NT version 3 was not widely used, but was followed by steadily improving versions 3.5 and 3.51, and by Windows NT 4.0 in 1996, which was designed to have a similar look and feel to Windows 98. This was used in quite a few professional environments, often for client machines as well as servers, and was a clearly better product than Windows 98.
At this point, Microsoft realised that the old DOS based Windows was not good enough for clients in the long run either, and decided that it would base its future client Operating Systems on Windows NT well. Therefore, the next version of Windows was based upon Windows NT. This was Windows 2000, which came in both a server and a client version (Windows 2000 Server, and Windows 2000 Professional), and is Windows NT 5.0. The 5.0 actually makes it the successor to Windows NT 4, not classic Windows 4. However, both versions of Windows very deliberately had the same version number at the time, so this point is often brushed over.
Despite having version number 5.0, Windows 2000 was actually the third version of NT, and became the first version of Windows NT to find itself in extremely wide use, perhaps confirming Microsoft's "Third time gets it right" reputation, or perhaps not, given that the earlier versions of NT were much better products than the equivalent versions of classic Windows.
At the time Windows 2000 was released, it was considered ready for professional environments, but not for consumer environments, as there was not yet enough driver support in environments containing lots of diverse hardware, and because it required more hardware resources than many consumers were typically using. Therefore, there was not consumer version of Windows 2000, and Windows ME was released at the same time as the last version of DOS based Windows, although considering how awful it was, this may not have been a wise move. However, this gave Microsoft time to make their next NT based product more consumer friendly and for drivers to be developed for more hardware. This happened, and Windows XP came out in both professional and consumer versions in late 2001. This was Windows version 5.1. (All versions of WIndows after this are Windows NT based, but I will from here stop putting this before every version number to save myself the typing). Windows XP is actually extremely similar to Windows 2000 internally, although it has a different visual appearance.
Microsoft did not have a new version of the server version of Windows ready in 2001, and didn't really need one, as driver support and a different visual appearance are much less of an issue with servers anyway. Microsoft did not get a new version of Windows server ready until 2003. Possibly because it was a little later than the consumer XP, this was given the name "Windows Server 2003" rather than a letter based name. In any event, this is considered by many to be the most stable version of Windows ever produced, and it has version number 5.2. Around this time, Microsoft developed 64 bit versions of Windows XP (based firstly on the ill fated Itanium processor, and then on the x86-64 architecture). These were based on Windows Server 2003, and both also have version number 5.2.
The next version of Windows, which was codenamed "Longhorn" internally at Microsoft and ultimately became Vista, had a troubled life which began early. Initially it was intended to be released around 2003, and Microsoft started with the standard XP codebase and developed from there. After a couple of years this project had evolved into an almighty mess, and Microsoft made the decision to abandon most of the code that had been written and use the Windows 2003 server codebase as a starting point from which to try again. After many more further problems with this project, Microsoft finally released Vista in 2007. This was Windows 6.0. Vista wasn't really finished at the time and had horribly lacking driver support, and developed a bad reputation. A lot of people didn't feel like upgrading hardware for the new OS, and for various reasons new categories of PC with relatively simple hardware became popular (netbooks, most notably). Thus there was great reluctance to upgrade to Vista, Microsoft is still selling XP in some categories, and Microsoft was determined not to make the same mistakes again.
Rather than attempting to put a lot of new features in the next Windows, Microsoft decided to fix the problems with Vista, wait for better driver support, and slim the code down so that it would run better on current hardware. They wanted drivers that had been developed for Vista to work on their new system, so as to not be hit by driver incompatibility problems again.
They largely did this. Windows 7 is largely "A slimmer Vista that Works". In defence of Vista, after two service packs and some, Vista pretty much works at this point, too. However, due to the bad reputation of Vista, Microsoft wanted to sell the new product as something new that it would dissociate from Vista. So, they did the same thing that had been done to disassociate XP from Windows 2000, which is that they gave the default screen lots of different colours from the previous release. And they gave it a brand new name that sounded like a version number of a major release.
Except, of course, if you go look in the registry, there is a dark secret.
That's right. If you ask Windows 7 what its version number is, it answers that it is version 6.1. "Windows 7" is not actually a version number. It is a version name.
There is something very Microsoft about this.
There is actually a good reason for this. When drivers are being installed, the registry is examined to check the version number of Windows to see if they are compatible with the operating system. Usually, they decide if they are compatible or not based on the major version number - ie the number before the point. If this is different from what they expect they may refuse to install. If the registry was set to 7.0 then many drivers that were previously designed for Vista would not install, even though Windows 7 might well work fine with them in all other ways. This suggests something slightly askew in the overall design of Windows driver support model, but we shall let this pass for now. Given, though, that Microsoft has gone to some trouble to minimise changes from Vista so that Vista drivers will continue to work on the new system, it probably is reasonable to conclude that from a technical perspective, 6.1 is a more reasonable version number than 7.0.
As I said, there is something very Microsoft about this.
Windows me 4
windows xp 5
windows Vista 6
Windows 7 !!!!!!!!
Because Poway only has a 9th street.
My Windows XP actually says its 5.2
I never installed Vista on my machine. Not about to. I do have the Windows 7RC installed on a separate partition however and its an improvement on Vista, but I still won’t be running to get rid of my XP.
Turned out to be an interesting read. Thanks for posting it!
I think it is like an old Mad Magazine cartoon I once saw. It showed a bunch of guys jumping around holding their butts. Underneath it said “Preparations A through G”.
I've been using Windows 7 since January on three computers and think it's great.
But then there is the awful itching...
Windows 3.1 ,95 ,98 , ME ,XP , Vista , 7
Countem’, seven
What I want to know is: have they hanged the people responsible for Office 2007 yet? If not, why not?
lol
windows 2000?
windows 98SE?
windows 3.11?
windows NT?
1. Windows
2. Windows 286
3. Windows 3.0/3.1
4. Windows 95/98/Me
5. Windows XP
6. Windows Vista
7. Windows 7
As long as we’re walking down memory lane: WFW3.11 was da bomb. Fast and easily networkable compared to Win3.1.
Windows NT 3.1 minimum memory requirements? 12MB. I think :-) It ran on 12MB too.
LOL. I grew up on Mad Magazine.
I did apaper on Mad magazine. It was the highest score I received in college.
This is almost the end. This is always the end. The end is almost always ending. And yet it never ends.
those were all different versions of a same basic OS
Windows 2000 was a professional version or ME.
Windows 98se was 98 with all the service packs
and so on.
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