Microsoft Windows

A fairly well known operating system from Microsoft Corporation.

Porting issues

As MS Windows and OS/2 have similar origins there is still a bit of compatibility between the systems, naming conventions, folder structures and handling of codepages for instance are either similar or identical. And while the systems have diverged greatly in the last few years, some developments have been in parallel, such as both systems having base support for 16 bit Unicode unlike the 8 bit Unicode offered by most Unix like systems.

Known versions

This lists major versions of Windows, minor versions or minor bug fix releases are not listed unless they have some specific significance.

Original code base

• MS Windows 1.0
• MS Windows 2.0
• MS Windows 2.1/286
• MS Windows 2.1/386
• MS Windows 3.0
• MS Windows 3.1
• MS Windows 3.11 (Windows for Workgroups)

Hybrid 16/32 bit versions

• MS Windows 95
• MS Windows 95 OEM (FSR2/3/4)
• MS Windows 98
• MS Windows 98SE
• MS Windows ME

Windows NT

• MS Windows NT 3.0
• MS Windows NT 3.5
• MS Windows NT 4
• MS Windows 2000
• MS Windows XP
• MS Windows XP Professional 64
• MS Windows XP Tablet PC Edition
• MS Windows XP Media Center Edition
• MS Windows XP Embedded Edition (aka XP POS)
• MS Windows Vista
• MS Windows Vista 64
• MS Windows 7
• MS Windows 7 64
• MS Windows 8
• MS Windows 8.1
• MS Windows 10

Server versions

• MS Windows NT Server 3.1
• MS Windows NT Server 3.5
• MS Windows NT Server 4

Starter editions

Microsoft has from time to time come out with "lower cost versions" of its OEM OS software intended to be sold with very low cost hardware such as Netbooks. In the case of an un-named XP variant it was crippled with both software and license restrictions, you could only sell it with hardware that had 1Gb of memory or less, with the "Starter editions" of Windows Vista and 7 you could only run three applications concurrently. More recent cut down versions of Windows 8.x and 10 are free, have fewer tools than the full versions and display adverts.