Then Windows 2000 came along. This was the technological achievement that Microsoft had been trying to do for years: kill off unstable DOS code with an OS that was compatible with all existing software. Windows 2000 played DirectX games, which was something that only Windows 9x would previously do.
Windows Me (Millennium Edition) was released shortly after Windows 2000, and was the last version to be based on 16-bit DOS code. The average person was confused, because they didn’t understand that one was a professional version, and another the consumer version.
The thing to remember is that Windows 2000 is actually NT version 5.0, and Windows Me is a subversion of Windows 95. Since Windows 95 was the successor to Windows 3.1, then shouldn’t W95 be Windows 4.0? Wait, there was already a Windows NT 4.0. Do you see where this starts getting a little confusing?
Windows 2000 was also built for 64-bit Itanium processor. Going by the rules of version numbers, should this operating system have an incremented version number, or be considered a subversion (or flavor) of Windows 2000 (NT 5)?
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