• Trailblazing Braille Taser@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    10 months ago

    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.

          • Octopus1348@lemy.lol
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            10 months ago

            I once heard some YouTuber say Windows uses \ in path names instead of / like everyone else because Microsoft thinks backwards.

            • dan@upvote.au
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              10 months ago

              As what often happens, using \ for paths is for backwards compatibility.

              Neither CP/M nor MS-DOS 1.0 had folders. When folders were added in MS-DOS 2.0, the syntax had to be backwards compatible. DOS already used forward slashes for command-line options (e.g. DIR /W) so using them for folders would have been ambiguous - does that DIR command have a /W option, or is it viewing the contents of the W directory at the root of the drive? Backslashes weren’t used for anything so they used them for folders.

              This is the same reason why you can’t create files with device names like con, lpt1, and so on. DOS 2.0 has to retain backwards compatibility with 1.0 where you could do something like TYPE foo.txt > LPT1 to send a document to a printer. The device names are reserved globally so they can work regardless of what folder you’re in.

          • Honytawk@lemmy.zip
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            10 months ago

            Well, better to be backwards with backwards compatibility than to just be backwards.

            looks at Apple

      • intensely_human@lemm.ee
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        10 months ago

        it could’ve just been windows nine. or any other word that isn’t a number

        But “nine” is a word that is a number

    • puttputt@beehaw.org
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      10 months ago

      The reason they checked that it started with “Windows 9” was because it worked for “Windows 95” and “Windows 98”

    • dev_null@lemmy.ml
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      10 months ago

      An often repeated urban legend that has no basis in reality. Software checking the version of Windows gets “6.1” for Windows 7 and “6.2” for Windows 8. The marketing name doesn’t matter and is different.

    • activ8r@sh.itjust.works
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      10 months ago

      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.

    • dan@upvote.au
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      10 months ago

      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

    • dfyx@lemmy.helios42.de
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      10 months ago

      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.

      • Wrrzag@lemmy.ml
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        10 months ago

        Because it checks if the version starts with the string “Windows 9*”, not wether the number is less than 9.

        • dan@upvote.au
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          10 months ago

          This is a myth - code that checks the version number uses the internal version number, which is 4.0 for Windows 95.

    • Ziixe@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      10 months ago

      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