I personally never had any issues with Vista. Even deferred win7 for 4-5 years until I got curious. Though I did have a system made for it, so that was part of it.
I don't know if they reclassified it at some point, but back on those days 3.5 was titled "Windows for Workgroups" and 4.0 was the first to be known simply as "NT".
Forget what I said, I recalled an old memory from childhood of a 3.5 upgrade box for people running Windows for Workgroups.
NT 4.0 is definitely what popularized that version prior to Windows 2000 and XP. Most people who just say "Windows NT" are thinking about 4.0.
Replace NT in this list with ME and you have all the consumer versions. NT versions 3.5 and 4 were the business versions in parallel with 95, 98, and ME.
Win2k wasn't consumer. It was the business offering at the same time as ME, which may be surprising to some. Xp was their successor, merging the business and personal lines.
This is a myth. The Win32 API doesn't even have a method that returns the string "Windows 95"! Windows version numbers are numbers, not strings. Windows 95 was actually 4.0. Windows 98 was 4.1, ME was 4.5, and XP was 5.0.
Actually it's not entirely a myth - there was some Java library that did this - but it wasn't widespread at all, and certainly not the documented approach to check the version.
Close but not exactly. Windows 5 was 2000, Windows 5.1 was Windows XP.
But it's more confusing than that because of the two different lines: the MS-DOS based line which covered Windows 1.0 through ME, and the multi-user NT line for workstations and servers which adopted the same version numbers as the currently released MS-DOS line that was available at the same time. I.E. windows NT 3.1 used the windows 3.1 UI from the DOS line, but was New-Technology instead of DOS under the hood. NT4 used the DOS based win95 UI, and NT5 was Windows 2000 also with the familiar Windows 9x UI. Everything since XP has been exclusively NT under the hood.
Lmao they only considered 95 > 98 > ME to be minor version updates? They didn't even deserve their own major version? Although it's probably pretty accurate, I remember 98 basically just being a slightly updated 95. I never used ME so no idea with that. It's still pretty funny though.
NT (3.x & 4.0) and 2000 were also available as Workstation editions. They were concurrent with Windows 3.x, 95, 98 and ME (which did get missed on the above)
NT 3.1 came out before 95, and isn't a single version (Windows 11 is still Windows NT). If you include NT as a version, you can't include 2000, XP, or anything after.
For anyone really curious about this, 1, 2, 3, 95 and 98 are using the old MS-DOS Kernel. Windows 3 was the first product also released with an alternative new NT Kernel and available as Windows 3 NT.
So then when they continued with this NT Kernel they continued to count the version number like that (at least retrospectively when creating Windows 7).