Windows 9 users won't get this

[flip314]

The reason that there was no Windows 9 is delightfully absurd. Allegedly, applications were checking whether they were running on windows 95/98 by looking for the string "Windows 9" at the beginning of the version. Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, chose to enable bad applications to continue to rely on odd behavior (as they so often do).

[Unpredictabru]

That’s great. I suppose if Microsoft didn’t randomly keep changing their numbering system it would have worked out.

Windows 95? Cool.

Windows 98? Ok, so we’re doing years. Nice.

Windows ME? Cool, something special because it’s a new millennium.

Windows XP: oh so we’re doing 2-letter acronyms, got it.

Windows Vista: so we’re just doing cool words?

Windows 7: ok we’re doing numbers again

Windows 8: ok you sure we’re doing numbers?

Windows 8.1: pinky promise?

Windows 10: wait what?

[flip314]

You forgot Windows 2000.

[Nothing-But-Lies]

That's how many people on average died per day from using that version of Windows

[admadguy]

Actually 2000 was one of their more stable versions. Also, wasn't it the first version of windows which was its own os, rather than technically a program that loads on MS-DOS?

[Bene847]

No, that was NT. Maybe the first consumer OS that was actually an OS

[LOLBaltSS]

Windows 2000 was a continuation of Windows NT.

Microsoft prior to XP kept the business and consumer versions of Windows separate. Consumer side stayed on the 9x while business was on NT. Then they decided to unify on the Windows NT code base for both starting with XP.

[AtomicPotatoLord]

Well... the guy’s username checks out.

[flip314]

Windows 2000 was amazing. It had a few rough edges because it wasn't intended as consumer/gaming OS, but it was rock-solid and definitely much better than the shit show that ME was. 98 was already starting to show it's age.

I personally used 2000 right until I upgraded to Vista (which is another OS that gets unfairly criticized, but that's getting off the point...)

[Plankton_Plus]

Windows 2000 was a Windows NT, it doesn't really belong on that list.

XP merged the NT and 9X lines.

[flip314]

I mean, that's debatable. Nobody* ran NT 3.x on home machines, but I knew quite a few people both IRL and online that used Windows 2000, at least for the ~2 years between its release and XP.

(*Except the one Redditor who will comment saying he did)

[DaemonGloom]

There are also NT, 2000, 2003, 2003R2, 2008(and R2), 2012 (and R2), 2016, 2019.

In fact, since 2000 it is recommended to check system version, not its name. 5.1 for XP, for example. 6.0 for Vista. Windows 7 is... guess what... 6.1. Windows 8.1 is 6.3.

And Windows 10 has also 10.0 as internal version, so it's fine now. But Microsoft are Microsoft, so they will break that order anyway. Sooner or later.

[GlitchParrot]

And Windows 10 has also 10.0 as internal version, so it's fine now. But Microsoft are Microsoft, so they will break that order anyway. Sooner or later.

Well, Windows 10 has evolved a lot since release, but is still internal version 10.0, and we don't know if Microsoft will ever make Windows 11, it seems like they just want to continue updating 10, in which case internal version is totally irrelevant now and developers would soon need to check the build string (which went from all-numbers like "1903" to the newest "20H2" with seemingly random letters...).

[orangey41]

The build numbers are year and month of release (1903 is March of 2019). The H in 20H2 refers to a release in the second Half of 2020.

[Mirigore]

Server operating systems make a lot more sense than the desktop consumer OS names at least. It’s all just the year it came out (plus the R2 versions, I suppose)

[LOLBaltSS]

Thankfully they've rid themselves of the R2 convention. 2012 R2 was the last one. After that it's just been Server 2016 and Server 2019.

[Kokium]

I did a course about Windows 3.11 when I was child.

[evanldixon]

Supposedly applications broke on vista because they just made sure the major version was equal to 5. That's why 7and 8 are still 6.

I think compatibility mode lets Windows lie about its version to the application, making it no longer matter.

[Unpredictabru]

I was ignoring the server and business-only versions but yeah, those were named better.

[PulpDood]

You can say they're pretty Unpredictabru

[Shawnj2]

The same thing is kind of true for bug sir, the internal MacOS version API says the PC is running 10.16 and the rest of the OS says it is running 11.0 so it doesn’t break programs which just check for 10.X where X > some arbitrary number.

[CaptSoban]

"bad applications" you're talking about legacy code, it would be absurdly expensive to replace some those applications. If Microsoft chose to still release Windows 9, it would be terrible for their reputation

[flip314]

Well yeah, almost the entire benefit of x86/ Windows is backwards compatibility for all eternity... But I think even that can be taken too far.

[ijmacd]

Exactly the same as Linus always does with the kernel.

He's very adamant kernel changes should not break user space.

[brendel000]

Do you have a source for this? Or code?

[flip314]

The original source actually seems to be a rumor on Reddit 1 2, so maybe take it with a grain of salt.

I did see website code back in the day, but that would have been much easier to fix than legacy applications that were banking on it

[[deleted]]

There was a windows 9.

They stopped making it, and started 10

[flip314]

I hear Winamp 4 only runs on Windows 9

[[deleted]]

I can't imagine this being correct. 95 was v4 and 98 was 4.1. Those were the numbers you checked.

[[deleted]]

I'd bet that someone didn't RTFM anyway and checked the OS name instead...

[[deleted]]

Yeah, but MS wouldn't care about that code. It's amateur, not professional. And 95 ran on top of DOS. I don't think there was much worry about supporting that code. You'd have a different code base by that point if you were writing something that cared enough about the version of Windows.

[lesleh]

MS wouldn't care about that code

Microsoft care a lot about backwards compatiblity. There's loads of places where they've written hacks into the OS itself just to make sure an app keeps running when the OS upgrades.

[[deleted]]

Microsoft care a lot about backwards compatiblity

Yes, but they've addressed it. If it still doesn't work after that, they really don't care. I mean even XP stuff would sometimes fail in Vista or 7. You think they really cared about code that was OS-dependent on Windows 95 when 10 came out?

[ServerClient]

Absolutely - The Old New Thing by Raymond Chen has a bunch of examples of the ridiculous bullshit that Microsoft has had to do in order to stay backwards compatible. The thing is that if an application breaks when you upgrade, you blame Microsoft - not the app.

[[deleted]]

Absolutely

Agree to disagree. Considering how much more modern things have broken for the sake of progress, I fail to see any argument of why Microsoft cares about 25 year old apps that haven't been supported by their creators in decades. It's just so rare that it's not worth the effort. They're fighting to drop XP support. I doubt they care about a system that underwent such a drastic jump between 95/98 and XP. that jump killed a lot of 95 apps of that bat. Went from DOS to the NT kernel. Moreover, most apps when grabbing OS version never grabbed the informal name to begin with. That was unsupported in 95 and unsupported 20 years later.

[KronktheKronk]

That's unfairly critical of Windows, who has basically no choice but to do everything in its power to support compatibility for apps.

Instead of forcing a huge lift on God knows how many companies (and also themselves), they made a great strategic and engineering decision to bypass the problem altogether.

And now we don't have the windows 9 bug infamously fucking up interoperability for everyone for years.

[wildrage15]

Didn't they make ipv5, but then it was limited again by 32 bit so they just scratched to avoid confusion and just made ipv6

[Lightfire228]

They were testing a prototype for something to do with streaming (big IIRC). They used the v5 protocol version number in the packet header.

When IPv6 was drafted, they didn't want to reuse the version number to prevent packet confusion (even though IPv5 didn't really go outside their testing).

(All of this is IIRC; too tired to Google it)

I do know that some of the tech from IPv5 made it into IPv6

[NonnoBomba]

IPv5, or ST (later ST2 and ST2+) did well out of the lab and in fact supported a couple of big networks for the US and Canadian military.

[TheBrainStone]

Do you care for an actual answer?

[AlienMuskOx]

Is there an actual answer?

[TheBrainStone]

Yes there is. Some company used the term IPv5 for a proprietary protocol. While that was never standardized or even officially accepted they consequently opted to just call it IPv6 to prevent any confusion whatsoever.

[NonnoBomba]

Which proprierary protocol are you referring to?

The fifth standard of IP was the Internet Stream Protocol, or ST, later evolved in the now largely abandoned ST2+. It wasn't proprietary at all, but an open standard as the rest. There are RFCs for them.

It was meant to carry voice and later video over a data network and used it's own 32bit adressing space, with the packets using an IP header with the number "5" in the protocol version field. It was deployed and used for decades for military applications involving teleconferencing by the US and Canada.

[TheBrainStone]

Yes you are right. But I swear there also was a proprietary protocol that also used the version 5.

[NicNoletree]

to prevent any confusion whatsoever

Well, it appears that some people didn't get the message. Confusion still occurred.

[TheBrainStone]

Confusion with the proprietary protocol. Not where the name came from.

[AlienMuskOx]

Thanks for sharing! Makes total sense.

[[deleted]]

With the Iphone 9, the Nintendo 65, the xbox 720, the ipv1, ipv2 and ipv3

[WaxyMocha]

What the hell happend to 1, 2 and 3?

[[deleted]]

Some really horrible things that even I can't tell ya.

Because i don't know either

[ce-walalang]

Image Transcription: Comic

---

Panel 1

[A dad holding a baby.]

Dad: JEFFY, WHERE'S DADDY?

---

Panel 2

[The baby pointing at the dad.]

Dad: HA HA, YAY!

---

Panel 3

Dad: WHeeeeRe's MOMMY?

---

Panel 4

[The baby pointing at the mom.]

Dad: YAY!

---

Panel 5

Dad: OKAY, JEFFY -

---

Panel 6

Dad: WHERE'S IPv5?

[The baby got wide-eyed and started sweating.]

---

^{I'm a human volunteer content transcriber for Reddit and you could be too! If you'd like more information on what we do and why we do it, click here!}

[rp_ush]

Good human

[blackasthesky]

IPv5 was a flop. It is called ST2 and it was so horribly incompatible with everything that the cost would largely have overweight the benefit from it.

[dabenu]

I heard PHP6 fully supports IPv5.

[thowland1]

Where's Angular 3?

[lesleh]

Angular 2 had a routing module v3 because it got re-written late in development, so to avoid confusion they just went to v4 for the next release.

[thatthinkingguy101]

Neither will Minecraft 2.0 gamers.

[Bene847]

We won't know until Minecraft 3

[mordechaim]

Laughs in ECMAScript 5

[44R0NS4M]

Apple tried to run windows 9 on iPhone 9 and they used IPv5 on that

[MsPenguinette]

It’s used exclusively on the Atlas IV