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.
Maybe it’s a myth, but it sure sounds plausible. The software that checks the “Windows 9” substring doesn’t even have to exist for this to be reason they chose to skip to version 10 — they just had to be concerned that it might exist.
Sure, maybe there’s no C function that returns the string, but there’s a ver command. It would be trivial to shell out to the command. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ver_(command)
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.
The reason they checked that it started with “Windows 9” was because it worked for “Windows 95” and “Windows 98”
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
Maybe it’s a myth, but it sure sounds plausible. The software that checks the “Windows 9” substring doesn’t even have to exist for this to be reason they chose to skip to version 10 — they just had to be concerned that it might exist.
Sure, maybe there’s no C function that returns the string, but there’s a
vercommand. It would be trivial to shell out to the command. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ver_(command)This doesn’t prove anything, but there are a TON of examples of code that checks for the substring. It’s not hard to imagine that code written circa 2000 would not be future proof. https://sourcegraph.com/search?q=context:global+“\“windows+9\””&patternType=keyword&sm=0
oh
oh no
There’s code in the JDK that does that??
I really wish I didn’t see that.
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.