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.
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.
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
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.
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Say whatever you want about Microsoft, but they don’t mess around with backwards compatibility.
It’s easy to be backwards compatible when you’re backwards in general.
Well, better to be backwards with backwards compatibility than to just be backwards.
looks at Apple
They probably search for windows n(t) somewhere too ;)
But “nine” is a word that is a number
The reason they checked that it started with “Windows 9” was because it worked for “Windows 95” and “Windows 98”
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.
They’ll cut corners the more the shittier APIs and ABIs you provide
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.
Strange argument… how does that prevent checks versus Windows 7, 8 and 1* all of which would be less than 9.
Because it checks if the version starts with the string “Windows 9*”, not wether the number is less than 9.
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
Some programs just didn’t work on NT though. A lot of installers were more OS specific back then.
Eh. I think Microsoft should have let that break so the spaghetti code finally gets fixed