[chickenchase-rd]

maybe got your peanut butter mixed with your chocolate just a little....windows 95 etc, are product names, not version numbers. Windows 95 is version 4 with the last release likely being 4.0.950 C. To rant a little- I wouldnt count on MS to ever name anything well and at least once had 2 different products with the exact same name. They also named one ai product "Recall" which is a very negative name for a product which kind of got recalled ironically.

[ralferoo]

I'm aware that they are product names, but also very much "versions" in the public mind too. I guess that falls into the difference between build version and major version. People choose a major version for features, and get a build based on that version with the latest fixes but don't generally care what build. Even Dolphin is showing this split with their yymm-patch format for builds between releases.

Ironically, I was going to cite the humorous example of Sun and Solaris - the successor to SunOS 4.5 was identifiable from the OS itself (e.g. uname) as SunOS 4.6, but branded as Solaris 2.6 and older versions of SunOS 4.x were retro-actively labelled as other Solaris versions. They followed that by renaming Solaris 2.6 to Solaris 6 when they released Solaris 7, and again uname used the older format and returned SunOS 4.7.

[chickenchase-rd]

oh man Sun...

[prepmdvmdvt]

> I'm aware that they are product names

Then what is your point

[Dalewyn]

>windows 95 etc, are product names, not version numbers.

Rumor is Windows 9 got skipped between 8 and 10 because lots of software check for a "Windows 9" string or similar as a Windows 9x version check.

I am inclined to believe Microsoft looked into it, was horrified, and then nothing more was said as they quietly moved forward a number.

[chickenchase-rd]

nine sounds like a german word also, and our colleagues in germany joked about this and pinned memes in the break room about it

[philistine]

That is just a fairy tale. Marketing decides the name of the release, and marketing wanted to indicate a clean break. Microsoft never had a marketing idea all on its own, so it did what Apple did: it released Windows X, just like Apple had done with Mac OS X. On top of that, the numbering jump was also a way to indicate this was the last version of Windows. Remember that? Microsoft said Windows 10 was the end of the specific version release of Windows. That survived right until the time their latest attempt at a mobile OS failed miserably and was rolled into Windows development, giving us the immovable taskbar that everybody despises.