Software developer

Do you know why there was never a Windows 9? Us neither. No doubt jumping to 10 made sense from a marketing point of view, signifying a clean break with a major new version. But another rumour circulated by a Microsoft engineer on Reddit is a little more intriguing. In the 90s, the majority of PCs ran on Windows 95 or 98, and quite a few applications used identical coding across both versions, i.e. if(version.StartsWith("Windows 9")) { … }, so literally, “when the version name begins with Windows 9...”. As such, if Windows 9 hadn’t been renamed Windows 10, the same behaviours could have been applied 20 years down the road, leading to all manner of fatal errors... Hello blue screen of death.