Can’t call it Windows 9
But that actually made sense! They care about backwards compatibility.
For those not in the know: some legacy software checked if the OS name began with “Windows 9” to differentiate between 95 and future versions.
Say whatever you want about Microsoft, but they don’t mess around with backwards compatibility.
It makes sense why they did it, but their messed up versioning was the cause to begin with. You should always assume Devs will cut corners in inappropriate ways.
The API is fine. It returns the internal version number (which is 4.0 for Windows 95), not a string. https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/winnt/ns-winnt-osversioninfoexa. There’s no built-in API that returns “Windows 95” as a string.
some legacy software checked if the OS name began with “Windows 9” to differentiate between 95 and future versions.
This is a myth. Windows doesn’t even have an API to give you the marketing name of the OS. Internally, Windows 95 is version 4.0 and Windows 98 is 4.1. The API to get the version returns the major and minor version separately, so to check for Windows 95 you’d check if majorVersion = 4 and minorVersion = 0.
Edit: This is the return type from the API: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/winnt/ns-winnt-osversioninfoexa
Maybe it’s a myth, but it sure sounds plausible. The software that checks the “Windows 9” substring doesn’t even have to exist for this to be reason they chose to skip to version 10 — they just had to be concerned that it might exist.
Sure, maybe there’s no C function that returns the string, but there’s a ver command. It would be trivial to shell out to the command. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ver_(command)
This doesn’t prove anything, but there are a TON of examples of code that checks for the substring. It’s not hard to imagine that code written circa 2000 would not be future proof. https://sourcegraph.com/search?q=context:global+“\“windows+9\””&patternType=keyword&sm=0
but there are a TON of examples of code that checks for the substring
oh
oh no
There’s code in the JDK that does that??
I really wish I didn’t see that.
And for the same reason they went straight from 2.1 3.x to 5.0 when they renamed .Net Core to just .Net. Versions 3.x and 4.x would have been too easy to confuse (either manually or programmatically) with the old .Net Framework versions that were still in use, especially for Desktop applications.
Dotnet core 4 never existed because they wanted to make it the mainline dotnet… That means framework is retired and everything is now the slimmer multiplatform runtime.
Strange argument… how does that prevent checks versus Windows 7, 8 and 1* all of which would be less than 9.
Because it checks if the version starts with the string “Windows 9*”, not wether the number is less than 9.
I was about to say that most apps should check the NT number but then I remembered that until XP it wasn’t common to run a NT system, but then I remembered NT 4 existed basically in the same timeframe as 95 did, and even if the argument went to “it’s a 9x application”, shouldn’t these OSes at least have some sort of build number or different identifier systems? Because as I said NT systems were around, so they would probably need a check for that
