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this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2023
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new versions of windows just kind of feel like new phones now. It's good but.. who cares?
I can remember as a teen and upgrading from windows 98 to XP felt like jumping into the future.
Or, more recently, getting the first samsung galaxy after having a basic candybar phone.
Just seems like more of the same all while charging an arm and a leg for it.
Then xp to vista happened and it looked pretty but was unusable. Then 7 came out and it solved all the BS and was a relief. Then 8 came out and it looked pretty but was unusable. Nobody is quite sure what happened with 9 but 10 was ok I guess, better than 8. Then I started using Linux because I was sick of the bullshit.
9 was skipped because there was concern with old/lazily coded programs running in compatibility mode for Windows 9x versions.
Basically, when the windows versions went from Win95/98/ME to 2000 and XP, some lazy programmers went “well by the time Windows 2090 rolls around I’ll be dead” and just had their programs check the windows version for a 9 when deciding whether or not to run in compatibility mode. If it detected a 9, then it would run in compatibility for 95/98/ME.
Microsoft wanted to avoid this potential issue, so they just skipped version 9 altogether and jumped straight to 10.
Unrelated but didn't a lot of things about that time skip a few versions to land at 10? Like I don't think there was an iPhone 9 and so on.
Marketing isn't a joke, who said that
They also didn't want to appear to be "behind" OS X.
Regarding why they just jumped to 10, I subscribe to the theory that enough software that required XP or greater checked for OS compatibility by looking for the string "Windows 9*" to catch both 95 and 98
Funny thing. The reputation of Vista is universal, so I don't doubt it at all. However, I ran Vista starting from beta and never had a problem with it. I must have had the magic hardware combination that worked. My least favourite Windows release was 8.
As someone who was stuck on vista as a teen towards the end of its life is wasn't a bad OS, but it did deserve the hate early on for being a buggy OS that was poorly optimised for the average hardware of the time. But then I moved to 7 and fell in love with it( or at least I thought it was great).
Then I upgraded to 10 and hated it. I switched to Mac for a couple of years and started liking unix but missed the hardware of PCs and didn't like the 10.15+ direction of MacOS.
So I switched to Linux( which I had messed with on an old laptop on and off as a teen, but at the time liked all my proprietary crap I was used too) and have never looked back.
I was one of the few people who bought the original Surface and I actually loved Windows 8 on that thing. I even used Internet Explorer because the touch interface was fantastic. It all got taken away though.
Vista was more stable and usable for me than xp ever was.
I got a laptop with Vista when it was new and though I'm wasn't really a Windows fan, I never really had a problem with it. I suppose I had never used XP though.
Vista became pretty good after tons of upgrades.
The stuff that made Vista shitty to most end users wasn't truly fixed with W7. For the most part W7 was a marketing refresh after Vista had already been "fixed." Not saying that it was a small update or anything like that, just that the broken stuff had been more or less fixed.
Vista's issues at launch were almost universally a result of the change to the driver model. Hardware manufacturers, despite MS delaying things for them, still did not have good drivers ready at release. They took years after the fact to get good, stable, drivers out there. By the time that happened, Vista's reputation as a pile of garbage was well cemented. W7 was a good chance to reset that reputation while also implementing other various major upgrades.
W7 was really just a vista service pack, but they had to rebrand it to make people want it.
I was running an it services business at the time, so got to see a broad number of machines and peoples complaints.
I think the massive jump in ram required was a huge problem, it went from most people having 128mb to 256mb, to a minimum of 512, but a reality of 2gb required.
Plus the indexer was relentless and just smashed HDDs.
Drivers were a problem too but people understood they would need to be have upgrades for their fancy new system.
I'll second the issues with the indexer. I disabled it for every disk I had because the additional I/O load for disks was ridiculous. I remember benchmarking game launches with it enabled and disabled to see how much of a difference there would be, and I saw some games take a full minute less to load into a playable state.
I don't know if I just had more files than the average consumer or what, but they didn't anticipate the load under certain scenarios.
I finally jumped onto the linux train after the rumour that windows 11 was going to have ads right in windows explorer. I'm glad it never happened but now that i'm on linux for my main PC.. i see no reason to go back.
In the programming world, versions with a 9 as a major digit, or most significant minor digit, are considered bad luck. Windows 95 and 98 aren't considered amongst that bad luck thing though, as they were actually versions 4.0 and 4.1, respectively. 95 and 98 were named after the year they were released, but their internal version numbers did not include a 9. Windows ME was a disaster though, and it's version number was 4.9...
It's kinda like how people are superstitious about the number 13, programmers are now superstitious about version numbers with a 9 in the version number now. Windows ME probably at least partly started that.
But hey, that's just coming from many years of experience with technology starting from the mid 90's and also a handful of articles I've read over about it, who really knows though?
I do believe that version numbers with a 9 in them lead the end users to think "Hey, this is a 0.9, 1.9, 9, whatever, when are they gonna fix all the bugs and release the 1.0, 2.0, 10.0, etc..."
Where are you located? I don’t know any programmer who is afraid of 9. Not even in releases.
We had a year of iterations of X.900, X.910, etc etc. None of us thought that was bad luck. And honestly we implemented some fun features to write.
Versioning is usually done with three numbers, often separated by a period. So Major.Minor.Patch/Hotfix. So we would have X.900 for the first minor version of X.9. If (when) there is a hotfix, that becomes X.901. For a lot of other software it would be X.9.1. Either way, skipping 9 would just cause confusion. I’ve never heard of this superstition and I’ve never seen a software company skip 9 in their versioning.
Was your software meant for internal or corporate use, or was it meant for the average everyday consumer? Internal use is one thing, but the supposed superstition regards the average end user.
It comes off as if there's no good reason to go for a version 4.9 system, when you might as well wait for them to iron out all the bugs and ship a polished off version 5.
For the end user, this is especially important when you'll have to pay for version 4.9, only to have to pay all over again for version 5. It's like in hindsight you knew you were pissing money away on 4.9 in the first place.
This is exactly what happened with Windows ME and Windows 2000, people just pissed their money away on ME. This is also more or less what happened with MacOS 9, people weren't all too pleased with that either.
Even in my own projects, if I've reached version numbering ending in a 9, that generally means I'm working on lots of internal changes, adding lots of features, and it is likely to have bugs. By the time I'm pretty damn sure most of the bugs are ironed out I'll up the version number and might actually let other people use it.
Edit: If the version numbering is for some background library that end users aren't necessarily going to have to directly interact with or inspect, then it hardly matters, just go ahead and go sequentially.
Nope. Our software is sold directly to end users. Pretty much any major company has software releases with 9 in it. Discord, dragon, play station, android, apple (watchOS 9), I could list more. And since a lot of software is moving to SaaS, the paying for a 4.9 won’t matter for those, as you just pay a monthly fee. In terms of OS, Ubuntu, Debian, a lot use 9 in their versions.
As for apple and macOS 9? Idk who wasn’t please with it. Just like ME and XP, macOS X was not well received by a lot of the more techy people. Hell, there are still people holding onto macOS 9 to this day. The difference from 9 to X was pretty significant in terms of UI, and people don’t usually like change.
Again, I’m curious where you are in the world because I have literally never heard of this. And I’m a developer so I feel like if that was a thing in my neck of the woods I or one of my friends would have heard of it.
Matters not where I am, if your software is distributed globally, it helps to avoid superstitious numbers from different regions...
https://hbr.org/2013/07/the-bad-luck-numbers-that-scar
Also, one case in particular, Winamp skipped version 4, because they were known for their skinnable interface.
They didn't want people ever saying the term 'Winamp four skins'... 😂🤣
May not be more of the same this time around
https://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-might-want-to-be-making-windows-12-a-subscription-os-suggests-leak/
The very start of that article: