What Happened to Windows 9? and Where did my Windows Media Player go?

This is just a quick post to pass on a few things I’ve learned. Some of this came up recently; it occurred to me that it would have helped me immensely if I’d known this ahead of time; the same could be true of others. So here it is. Like Nick Fury, I share. I'm nice like that. I may get an eyepatch.

First, did you know that Windows 10 is not actually Windows 10? It’s (paraphrasing here) actually Windows 8.2, but it’s not really even that. These aren’t actually version numbers – those are separate; these are just names that don’t match the real version number. For example, Windows 8.1 is actually version 6.3 of Windows. Windows 10 is version 6.4. The last time a release name actually matched a version number was the enterprise-focused Windows NT 4.0, which was released back in 1996. Windows 2000, which was called NT 5.0 during development, was actually version 5.0. Windows XP was version 5.1. Windows Vista was 6.0, Windows 7 was 6.1, Windows 8 was 6.2, and Windows 8.1 is version 6.3. So Windows 10 is actually Windows 6.4. Don’t know what we’ll do when we get to an actual version 7.0 – that could get confusing.

On top of that, there are other reasons for this skipping around. Apparently a Windows 9 would not have gone over well in Japan, “9” being the equivalent of unlucky “13” here. As well, many apps check for versions of Windows 95 and 98 by looking for anything that starts with “Windows 9” and making install decisions based on that…  because 95 and 98 were awful and needed all sorts of special handling.

I will avoid the obvious cheap shot that the best "special handling" would have been to install XP. See how I avoided that cheap shot? I'm so proud of myself.

Anyway, there’s more to how it came to be called “10”; feel free to look it up. The wikipedia article on it is somewhat informative, but leaves out so much that it borders on misleading. For the record: The GUI ('graphical user interface' aka “windows”) concept shared by both Windows and Mac operating systems (among others, such as OS/2) was invented by Xerox. Look up XPARC. The mouse was first used on a Xerox computer, though it had actually been invented at Stanford. Check out “The Mother of All Demos”.

Some of this jumping around with the “version” names was a desire to avoid association with past disasters, such as Windows 8, Windows ME, and so on. Speaking of which, I just have to mention what has to be one of the all-time stupidest design errors in history. "Have to" because it affected me personally and I’m still irritated. I was doing tech support at the time, and I had customers that were less than impressed, and guess who they called?

It is a fact that when Windows 95 and Windows NT were released, their file systems were not compatible, so one system could not see or use files produced by the other. I was unable to find any of this when I researched it to refresh my memory for this post, but I lived through it – I was the primary tech support for a state agency when this was happening; this is what I found when I did dig in to find out what the heck was going on.

Here’s what I learned back in the mid ‘90’s: Windows 95 was meant to be a client to the Windows NT server OS. In an attempt to produce a “clean sheet” design, one of the design teams was moved out of Redmond, and communication between the two teams was severely constrained. The other team was sent to Chicago, with the result that NTFS (NT’s File System) was developed with little coordination between the two, so the two systems that were supposed to work together did not work together nearly as well as they needed to. I’d appreciate any feedback on this, but don’t be too quick – if you really research PC history one thing you’ll learn is that there are as many versions of “what happened” as there are authors, including this one. FWIW, later on I learned even more when I researched Windows 95 development for IBM for a financial services client when they moved their help desk to W95. All that I learned then corroborated what I had learned earlier, and that I’m recounting here.

<Sarcasm on> Much fun was had by all. <Sarcasm off>

Changing the subject somewhat, I mentioned in an earlier post that I’d had an interesting experience with my Windows 10 upgrade. I’ve finally got the last bug sorted out, and I wanted to share a few more things I learned.

I will admit that I’m somewhat put out that Microsoft wasn’t more explicit about some of this; that, for example, the Windows 10 update removes Windows Media Player and prohibits reinstallation. Isn’t that interesting? Wouldn’t that have been nice to know before proceeding? Apparently, MS caught so much flack for this that the last update (1607, I think) restores it.

As well, in my upgrade, I had a great deal of trouble with a valid product key. Turns out a satisfactory key is the one your activated OS was using before you began the install. Again, nice to know before you started.

Here’s an oddity. The Windows Update troubleshooter on my system reported finding a usable product key, but would not tell me what it was. Now, there are only two places it could have found this key that would have mattered: either on my system, or on a MS database associated with my Windows Live account that I use for all my MS products. So why not just tell me? Seems odd to me. Anyway, this problem is apparently so big that MS has set up special handling. Instead of the usual run-around, I was almost immediately escalated to a free Premier Support session and my problem solved forthwith. The MS tech just asked me to dig out the last working key I had, which I could do since I back up everything (somewhere around here I have a back up of Noah's blueprints for his boat), and put it in. Voila! Problem solved.

Anyway, that’s the news. Windows Media Player was gone, and now it’s back (for now, anyway) and a key that works for W10 updates is the last one you had before the update. And Windows 10, isn’t. Also MS can err. There’s news.

In upcoming news, sooner or later, I'll actually finish a "Why Projects Fail" post, as well as a "PC Security" post. Really. I promise. And this time, I mean it.