Retrospring is shutting down on 1st March, 2025 Read more

Arthur · 4 answers · 3y

Everyone is talking about windows 11, but the real question is: what happened with windows 9?

They didn't make a Windows 9 because some old programs detect whether they're being run on Windows 95/98 by seeing if the name of the OS starts with "Windows 9", so some programs would have falsely reported that the version of Windows is too old for them to run.

8.1 was technically Windows 9. Win 8 was such a mess they were forced to update the previous OS instead of rolling out a new one. Same thing happened with Windows ME.

There is no Windows 9 because Windows 10 sounds better. Microsoft even made a joke about it, saying that they went to 10 because 7 8 9 (seven ate nine). Really, though, it was just marketing.

Retrospring uses Markdown for formatting

*italic text* for italic text

**bold text** for bold text

[link](https://example.com) for link