Reply to post: Re: I stand by the opinion... unreleased versions were failed monstrosities killed at birth.

Oi! Linux users! Want some really insecure closed-source software?

patrickstar

Re: I stand by the opinion... unreleased versions were failed monstrosities killed at birth.

Windows 3.1 very much existed. And the numbering makes sense: 3.0 to 3.1 was a much bigger jump than 3.1 to 3.11.

3.11 basically just added some networking support and "32-bit file access" (basically bypassing DOS for file system operations).

After that they dropped the version numbers and went 95, 98, Me - related to release year (duh).

The NT branch went from 3.1 (numbered like that to match 'the other Windows') to 3.51 (which was primarily about performance improvements) to 4.0 (which was a bigger leap).

Then they dropped the version numbers and went 2000, XP, Vista, then back to version numbers: 7, 8, 10 (9 dropped supposedly because of lots of buggy old applications assuming they were on 9x if the version string started with 'Windows 9'). With the server releases after 2000 being 2003, 2008, 2012.

So apart from some obvious difficulty in making up their minds, it kinda makes sense. And no unexplained gaps anywhere that I can tell.

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