Why do they call it Windows “7″?
Microsoft’s latest Operating System, dubbed Windows 7, will make it’s full debut on October 22, 2009. I find it interesting that they have changed up their naming convention once again. The difference is, I think they got it right this time. Giving a version a number, as opposed to a year or a fancy name, takes out confusion as to which version came first as well as letting the OS age gracefully.
Windows Vista. What does that mean? Windows XP? I thought it was pretty stupid when they first announced it, but like any name, it caught on and no one really thinks twice about it anymore. But why call this one Windows 7? If you count the “major” releases of Windows, it is certainly not the 7th. At least, not to us. But if you look closely at the numbering scheme of Windows, you’ll see that it sort of is the 7th major release. As with why Microsoft differentiated their versions the way they did, I’ll never know. At any rate, here is a list of the OS releases that you and I have known over the past 20+ years and their corresponding official version numbers.
Windows 1.01 – Nov, 1985 – Apparently there was some major issue with Windows 1.0 so they had to do a mass recall and release 1.01.
Windows 2.0 – Dec, 1987
Windows 3.0 – May, 1990
Windows 3.1 – Apr, 1992
Windows NT 3.1 – Jul, 1993
Windows NT 3.51 – May, 1995
Windows 95 (4) – Aug, 1995 – This release marked probably the biggest leap in interface between versions. It’s the last time that Microsoft appeared to really overhaul the OS from almost the ground up. Visually, anyway. It wasn’t until 95b that we started getting support for more hard drive space.
Windows NT 4.0 – Jul, 1996 – Many businesses were getting into the game as far as networking their PCs around this time and NT 4 still has a presence in some legacy operations.
Windows 98 (4.10) – Jun, 1998 – This one seemed like a pretty major revision over 95, but I guess not?
Windows 2000 (5) – Feb, 2000 – I used this one as my home OS for quite a while and was always pretty happy with it.
Windows Me (4.90) – Jun, 2000 – This release is still Microsoft’s biggest blunder. A lot of people have gotten used to Vista and Service Packs have made it pretty useable, but Windows Me was an abject horror from beginning to end.
Windows XP (5.1.2600) – Oct, 2001 – This OS has been around for so long now, people seem to forget how bad it was until SP1 came out. It wasn’t until SP2 that it really felt complete.
Windows Vista (6) – Nov, 2006
Windows 7 (6.1) – Oct, 2009 – Funny story…Microsoft seems to want to get on track with their version numbers, but they picked the wrong time to do it. Since 7 is really only a minor release/upgrade to Vista, it didn’t actually get the major upgrade version number. This probably is a pain in the ass for a number of people within the organization. Are they still going to call the next major release Windows 8? Who knows.
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