Yuhong_Bao

Since Windows 2000 wasn’t in wide release at the time, and Intel wanted to avoid this tech support issue, the family code had to be changed to avoid a conflict with Windows NT.

By the time P4 got released at around the end of 2000, Windows 2000 has existed for almost a year.

codinghorror

Looks like Windows 10 had the same issue! Per a Microsoft dev comment on Reddit:

Microsoft dev here, the internal rumours are that early testing revealed just how many third party products that had code of the form

if(version.StartsWith("Windows 9"))
{ /* 95 and 98 */
} else {

and that this was the pragmatic solution to avoid that.

1 reply

Ajedi32

Really? Wow, that’s hilarious!

Also, from the same thread:

indexOf("windows 9") | searchcode

startswith("windows 9") | searchcode

Looks like there’s plenty of software out there that actually does check the version that way.