Should Windows 11 Have Actually Been Called Windows 9?

Why Microsoft’s operating system version history makes no sense

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

In case you didn’t realise, Microsoft released Windows 11 yesterday.

I’m just wondering, shouldn’t it be called Windows 9?

What am I talking about? Have I gone insane? No.

Okay, let’s back up a bit and have a quick recap of the versions of Microsoft Windows over the years, so we can see where the issue is.

For the first fifteen years of Windows, the version numbers of the main releases made sense:

• Windows 1 was released in 1985
• Windows 2 was released in 1987
• Windows 3 was released in 1990
• Windows 3.1 was released in 1992
• Windows NT was first released in 1993, starting with version number 3.1
• Windows 3.11 was released in 1993
• Windows 95 was version 4
• Windows 98 was version 4.10

But from 2000, the version numbering started to go a bit wonky:

• Windows 2000 was Windows NT 5.0
• Windows ME, released later the same year, was Windows 4.90