The Amazing World of Software Version Numbers 321
Harry writes "In theory, software version numbers should be incredibly mundane. In reality, companies have long twisted them for marketing purposes, avoided ones they didn't like, and even replaced them with things other than numbers. I've prepared a tribute to them with some facts and ruminations, but there's a lot I don't know, and I'd appreciate help on the historical side of things. (Anyone know when the standard decimal point-based system came into use?)"
What now? (Score:5, Funny)
What is this standard you are referring to?
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Well, clearly you're NOT a code because if you were you would have titled that post "Response 2.1.1 Beta Relase. Do not read on production systems!"
Re:What now? (Score:5, Insightful)
1.1.1 -> 1.1.2 - bugfix only, no change in what the end-user sees.
1.1.1 -> 1.2.0 - new features, perhaps a button in the UI has moved. Still fully compatible with the previous version. Documents should be stored identically, network protocols unchanged.
1.1.1 -> 2.0.0 - major release, might very well break functionality, documents may have to be converted from previous versions, UI can change drastically.
Re:What now? (Score:5, Insightful)
X.Y (B): X: major version as you've outlined. .Z, as you've also outlined: every public facing build increments Z before shipping, in order to indicate if it is a bug fix. If there is a .Z, then the build number can be hidden from the user--the only purpose it serves is for customer support to know which build the user has so bugs can be tracked appropriately.
Y: minor version as you've outlined.
(B): Build number; this is an auto-incrementing number which indicates the build. This is used for QA tracking purposes.
I can also see adding a
I don't see any reason why it needs to be any more complicated than that.
Re:What now? (Score:5, Funny)
1.1.1 -> 2.0.0 - Expect 2.0.1 within the week.
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I remember seeing some specialist mainframe software which pretty much followed this scheme; each week had a new "minor" release on schedule, so released would be numbered X.Y.0 upto X.Y.52 each year.
If you have a sufficiently large and complex product, you'll probably find atleast a few new bugs and/or significant performance/security/stability improvements each week.
Re:What now? (Score:4, Insightful)
> 1.1.1 -> 2.0.0 - major release, might very well break functionality, documents may have to be converted from previous versions, UI can change drastically.
Um, you missed the most important part.
1.x -> 2.x releases are when the business needs upgrade revenue, whether there is significant, useful new functionality or not.
Re:What now? (Score:4, Insightful)
Sometimes the version numbers are decided upon before the final set of changes has been determined. Often politics get involved, and other external issues. Ie, things like "version 2.5 will be the last one supported on old hardware".
Last place I was at used "major.minor.dailybuild". This got confusing, since every day there was at least one more version to deal with, plus some incremental builds. The build engineer memorized all this stuff, but I could never distinguish 3.1.212 from 3.1.243...
Dewey Decimal System (Score:3, Funny)
Re:What now? (Score:4, Interesting)
You increment the BugFix number when you implement a bug fix that makes no changes whatsoever to the interface. You increment the Minor number when you extend the interface (by adding new features). Both of these changes are backwardly compatible so you can just restart an executable that uses the library without having to rebuild or relink.
If you alter the interface in a non-backwardly compatible way then you must relink your executable before it can work with the new version of the library. The Major number is incremented to indicate a non-backwardly compatible change.
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I personally use the X.Y.Z and increment each under the following conditions:
X++: New backwards-incompatible feature. For example, a new database schema would increment X.
Y++: New feature or feature set. For example: Adding a new widget.
Z++: Fixing bugs.
It works pretty well for me.
Why not just use a single version number that gets incremented by one every time there is a code change?
That's what your version control revision is for. Some of us would like to be able to tell at a glance whether having 2.3.4 might cause problems when transferring data to a 3.4.5 installation. You try doing that with betwe
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The difference between a minor and major bug fix is somewhat subjective. If a coder spent hours tracking down a bug that's been in the source code for ten years and never reported by any customers, that would seem to me to be a good candidate for the title "minor bug". If instead a coder spends 5 minutes changing a 1 to a 0 in a piece of code that has caused the program to crash for 50 customers (who have had technical support's phones ringing off the hook) since it was released yesterday, I'd call that a
w/r/t Windows (Score:4, Interesting)
Microsoft frequently jumps build numbers before milestones (7000 for Beta 1 of Win7, 7600 for RTM)
Microsoft often picks arbitrary numbers for revision builds (used to be buildnum.0, now it's buildnum.16384 as the starting point. Example: Vista RTM is 6000.16386, meaning there were three compiles of build 6000)
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Windows 7 is NT 6.1 because it's really just a .1 upgrade over Vista (NT 6). If they wanted to lie to applications and change the version number, they could have. They have mountains of other app compatibility settings, the number itself shouldn't hold anything back.
Re:w/r/t Windows (Score:5, Informative)
It still remains a major performance/stability/feature upgrade, thus why it is NT "7" theoretically.
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Gibbering about windows a bit; his list of why Windows 7 is, well, 7 is wrong. It should be:
Windows 1.0
Windows 2.0
Windows 3.0
Windows 95\98\ME
Windows XP
Windows Vista
Windows 7
There was a seperate branch of:
Windows NT4
Windows 2000
Windows XP
XP, of course, being the point where desktop windows & workstation\server windows got joined into one product line (based on NT). Didn't everyone know this already?
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Just to be pedantic, there were also important sub-versions in this list you've omitted, ie.: Windows 2.1/286, Windows 2.1/386 see link [wikipedia.org] for details. These we more than just the networking add-on you got with 3.0 > 3.11 .
Re:w/r/t Windows (Score:5, Informative)
Actually the reason the minor version number started at 16386 is that the part of the upper bits for the version number are used to indicate branch. In this case the release bit is set to 1, if this was a 'test' build then it would be set to 0. Another bit (which isn't set) is used for the corporate branch, which includes security updates that aren't as fully vetted and changes to core components requested by corporate partners. Additionally, the lower 16 bits of the build (6000) is used to indicate service pack (at least that was the plan right before release). This change to how service packs were handled was done in the last month, and yes Microsoft fudged the version number towards the end so it would be 6000 (although it was close to that at the end).
(I was the performance test engineer for Vista update services during the initial release of Vista)
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Wow, that's pretty cool! I regret having used up my mod points, as I wish I could mod you interesting. :)
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Re:w/r/t Windows (Score:4, Funny)
I really don't think the update services for Vista are that bad performance wise. But... my job didn't amount to anything, I was pretty much there so that the update division could state that they did performance testing.
16384 = 2^14 (Score:2)
It's only somewhat arbitrary
FFx2 (Score:5, Funny)
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You forgot MacOS 10.
And of course, Emacs 22.3
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Was there an ALGOL 60? I thought that was just called "ALGOL". Later when they revised ALGOL and called it "ALGOL 68" it became common to call the older version "ALGOL 60", but it was never part of its name.
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Ha! Our software now uses repository revision numbers, currently around 11200. Too bad the numbering restarted when we converted from cvs to svn.
First Post 5.0 (Score:3, Funny)
Different people, different numbering schemes. (Score:2)
major.minor.revisionXY
where the major number is 0 before the software is feature complete (based on original roadmap), 1 means feature complete, and this tends to increment when a full rewrite is done; minor are various milestones, and 'revision' are bugfix releases.
XY may be 'alpha','alpha2','alpha3', 'beta','rc1'.
So if you see a version number 0.9.3beta, you'll know it is an almost feature complete version, third bugfix but otherwise untested (be
Re:Different people, different numbering schemes. (Score:5, Funny)
That you, Gene Roddenberry?
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I realize it's personal preference, but it irks me seeing applications with a version number less than 1. Yeah, it's fine to say "it's version 0.5 because it doesn't have all the features", but it's never going to have all the features you want or planned.
The way I see it, by definition, the first time you hit Compile, you're creating "The First Version" - version 1.0. As far as I'm concerned, it starts at 1.0, not 0.1 or 0.0.0.1 or whatever else. If it takes all the way to version 2.0 to get "all the fe
I don't know what to do about 1.10 and beyond (Score:2)
If one only increments the major number when you break backward compatibility, then you can get 1.10, 1.11, 1.12, etc. But I think that looks awful! It doesn't sort right in text anymore, and 1.01.5 isn't going to make any friends.
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It doesn't sort right in text anymore,
It sorts properly in the Mac Finder ;p
But you are right, it's a pain when you are searching an FTP site for the latest version and you basically have to scan every single file because the newest isn't automatically sorted to the top or bottom of the list.
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It doesn't sort right in text anymore,
It sorts properly in the Mac Finder ;p
But you are right, it's a pain when you are searching an FTP site for the latest version and you basically have to scan every single file because the newest isn't automatically sorted to the top or bottom of the list.
Sort by date created/modified :P
0.97 0.98 0.99 ??? (Score:2)
I remember when MAME was hovering around the 0.97 mark and the user forums were asking if this meant that in 3 version's time MAME would hit version 1.0. The answer came back as no because that would mean that it was complete and MAME is nowhere near completed. Instead it went from 0.99 to 0.100.
(That's a period denoting the end of the sentence, not part of the version number in case anyone was confused.)
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Re:0.97 0.98 0.99 ??? (Score:5, Informative)
Which points up (no pun intended) the semantic confusion of using "." ("period", "full stop") as a version component separator. Semantically, it's not a decimal radix point. Therefore, the second component of your hypothetical version is not 99/100, it's integer 99. Therefore, integer 100 is indeed > integer 99, and the "." shouldn't be pronounced as part of it.
That doesn't happen, of course; we all* say "point 99" or the like, which is exactly the same as if the "." were, in fact, a decimal point.
*Not strictly "all"; I usually say "dot" instead of "point", partly because of this confusion. This usage became mainstream with "dot Net" since the string "Net" makes no sense as a real number "r" such that 0 > r > 1.
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Good points!
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Decimal version numbers (Score:2)
Well, decimal version numbers in their current form go all the way back at least to MS-DOS, so that would be 1982 (if not earlier). It used X.Y version numbers, eg. 2.1, 3.0, 3.1, with the now-common interpretation of the major versio number meaning significant new features were added and the minor version meaning fixes or enhancements to existing features but nothing major new or changed. I'm pretty sure the convention wasn't new with DOS, it probably goes back even further to the mainframe world.
they should be kept practical and useful (Score:2)
The crap that microsoft does is just exactly what i see in versions, versions like home basic, premium, ultimate just sounds like marketing cruft, when we all know the OS was originally built with ALL the features and all they did was cripple it in steps and named them as such,
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YY.MM might work for software bundles, like operating systems. But version numbers are of great importance for internal use, thus:
major.minor.micro.somethingForDevs
major -> major + 1 = major products differences... a lot of new stuff... don't blindly install this stuff (or, this requires clients to renew their license)
minor -> minor + 1 = might need configuration changes, 3rd party software linking to this might break
micro -> micro + 1 = just bugfixes, everything should still work as before (withou
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we have 91 years until that blunder comes back...
FTFY
If you keep using YY instead of YYYY, the infamous Y2k problem will repeat at 2100, not at 3000. Sure, you and I may not be around by that year, but I bet our grandsons will hate us for not learning the lesson the first time.
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Don't forget TIFF (Score:5, Interesting)
All TIFF files have a version number of 42, chosen, according to the developer docs, for that number's deep philosophical significance.
Software version vs. sequels (Score:2)
Software versioning gets really confusing with game programming, specifically versions vs. sequels. Zelda II and Mario II are sequels of the original - very different games. However, Quake 3 is more like a version difference from Quake 2, even though technically it's a "sequel". Windows 7 is definitely a version difference even though it wants to be a sequel. The difference? Because they are different, people understand why they should pay for sequels, while they want the less-different version upgrade
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os x (Score:5, Funny)
The article mentions OS X and the fact that they will be running out of cat names pretty soon.
My prediction: as soon as they run out of cat names, they'll go to 'OS 11'
Steve Jobs will market it by saying 'this one goes to eleven... It's one better, isn't it?'
Re:os x (Score:4, Informative)
In all honesty, I do wonder why they haven't done a Lion version yet.
Re:os x - Don't forget LOLCAT editions? (Score:5, Funny)
The possibilities are endless!
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However, that list consists primarily of names which don't quite seem to fit. I can't imagine the next version of OS X being named "Kodkod", for instance. Another entry on the list that seems unlikely to me is "Domestic Cat".
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They still can use lolcats, because by then it's all a joke anyway. ^^
Clipper Summer 87 (Score:2)
And then someone who hadn't bathed in 3 or 4 days would lean over me at my IBM PC XT computer and ask me for help in compressing an index. Daydream explodes.
Three Stelps (Score:2)
Step 2: ???
Step 3: PROFIT!
Oracle (Score:3, Interesting)
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Watcom was even better. The first release of their C/C++ compiler was Watcom C 10.0. They picked 10 because it was bigger than any competitor's version number at the time.
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Don't let the fact that DB2 is an IBM product restrain you from mocking Oracle.
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The first dBase was dBase II (from Ashton-Tate) to indicate it was more stable than the non-existant dBase I (Vulcan perhaps :) ).
[John]
Version numbers is about communication... (Score:2)
Version numbers is about communication and it doesn't matter one bit how fancy your system is if it's not communicated and understood by the intended recipiants. That can be things like API compatibility, binary compatibility, scope of UI/feature/fix changes or just the time of year (Ubuntu version numbers, anyone?) - there's really only one cardinal sin, and that's releasing something with an version number that doesn't correspond to the expectations. I don't mean version number nazis that insist you can't
Word for Windows version numbers (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm not sure if the step in Word for Windows version numbers really was because of WordPerfect. Prior to 6.0, Microsoft had two independent Word release series: The original Word running on DOS, which already had reached version 5, and Word for Windows, which only had reached version 2. With Word 6, the DOS and Windows version numbers got synchronized; since 5 was the latest DOS version number, it made sense to use 6 next.
Read it (Score:3, Funny)
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Good timing (Score:2)
Just this past week, in order to maintain some rpm repositories from multiple sources, I needed to discard versions of a package older than the most recent. What a pain (think about it ... mixed alphanumeric, usually numeric, but needing to sort numeric on arbitrary decimal and - boundaries).
Luckily I discovered the Sort::Version perl module. *whew*!
Another unusual case: 2 numbers for 1 version (Score:2, Informative)
Another interesting version number case occured during the gcc/egcs split: The egcs releases had two version numbers for the same release: One starting with 1.0.0, numbering the egcs releases, and the other one, IIRC starting with 2.91.0, giving a "gcc version number" to indicate that it was still considered to belong into the gcc family. After egcs officially bacame gcc again, the first releases had the form 2.95.x before the 3.0.0 release came out (starting from which the numbering followed the normal sch
Android's Alphabetical Desserts (Score:2)
I'm not sure what the previous versions were called, but Google's Android OS recently released Cupcake. Next up [gizmodo.com] is apparently Donut, then Eclair, then Flan.
XP and Pentium (Score:2, Interesting)
One reason marketers have given products names instead of numbers, which isn't mentioned in the article, is that courts have ruled that companies can't trademark numbers (though I can't find a source reference).
I grew up with (Score:5, Informative)
A.B.C.D
A: Major Release, violates backwards compatability
B: Feature Add Increment. Indicates new features from prior release
C: Bug Fix Release Increment.
D: Build Identifier usually YEARMONTHDATE
e.g.
1.1.0.080215
1.2.12.090714 (12th minor update to feature set 2 for release 1 built on July 14th 2009)
1.3.1.091224 (First minor update for feature set 3 built on Dec 24th 2009.)
Since most software tends to follow quarterly or monthly release schedules you rarely get more then 18 minor revisions if they are building weekly on a quarterly schedule or more then 4 on a monthly schedule.
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Here's how I interpret them numbers... (Score:3, Funny)
A.B.C.D
A: Major Release, really freaking hard. Will probably deprive you of sleep for a day or two. Start with backups, and test the backups before you bother.
B: Minor Release. Probably will not hork your computer, but will randomly do so.
C: Some number that I pretty much ignore.
D: LOL Wut?
What about Oracle??? (Score:2)
How can you omit Oracle? The first version was 2.0.
how about backing up? (Score:2)
Has anyone seen another program admit they screwed up and go backwards?
I purchased the old shareware database program PC-File (and still use it!) Not sure of the 1st versions, i don't think it had a number. 2nd one i got was version 5 and was a good program that could have used a few tweaks but was fast and simple. Version 6 changed drasticly and many functions got slow as it tried to go to a pretty UI. Version 7 tried to fix version 7 but was still sluggish. The next version released was.....version 5.5! T
My experience (Score:2)
For my own stuff at one point, I automated the version numbering based on dates. I would set the first year as the "epoch" for 1.0 and munge the day into the minor number. This was before I started working in an environment with a revision control system.
Later, I would have my programs output their revision numbers. (There are Subversion hacks combined with your makefiles that make this fairly easy).
Of course, in the corporate world there is always some agreed-upon version number that has nothing to do w
Doom II Version 1.666 (Score:5, Interesting)
One of my favorite version numbers was the version of the first Doom II executable (which used a different version number than the game itself as it shared the exact same executable with Doom I, Doom I shareware, and Doom II). The initial release of Doom II was "Doom II Version 1.666"".
We're not entirely innocent. (Score:2)
"Never trust/buy a x.0 version" .0 version more often than not was a "it compiles, ship it" version. If you were smart, you waited for .2. Kinda like you wait for SP2 today.
Sounds familiar? Of course. And with good reason, a
What did companies do? They offered a .0 version for a week or two, immediately followed by the "final final" .2 version. I wouldn't be surprised if we could soon only buy SP2 versions of some new OS.
The first signs are already there. Or did you get a WinXP version that didn't include a
Ruby programmers seem not to get it (Score:2)
The most irritating thing about this is that the documentation for the gem system has an entire section devoted to version numbers. It very clearly explains the major/minor/bug fi
StarOffice vs OpenOffice.org (Score:2)
The author of the article states that he doesn't know why we are on StarOffice 9 yet OpenOffice 3, when they are the same suite. Let me help.
StarDivision created StarOffice. They eventually sold StarOffice to Sun. When Sun released StarOffice 5.2, they open sourced it. This created OpenOffice. OpenOffice then had trademark issues and changed it's name to OpenOffice.org.
OOo released 1. Sun rebranded it as StarOffice 6.
OOo released 1.1. Sun rebranded it as StarOffice 7.
OOo released 2. Sun rebranded it
Mac OS 7.5.1 was my first... (Score:2, Funny)
...personal encounter with a second decimal point in a version number. Although I was just a high school kid at the time I can still remember all the geeks on the other side of the Mac/PC divide claiming it was aberrant and wrong.
Thus my general disrespect for proponents of the Windows operating system was born.
Algol 60 (Score:3, Informative)
The article states,
Did Windows 95 start the idea of using years instead of version numbers?
Nope -- it's a far older conceit than that. The earliest example I'm aware of is Fortran 66 ...
I believe Algol 60 predated that by a good 6 years, and Algol 58 by an additional two. While Algol 58 didn't see as wide usage, Algol 60 was, to many, the definitive version of that language.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALGOL [wikipedia.org]
I see he does not discuss SunOS/Solaris versions (Score:2)
Possibly because he fears that trying to explain them will cause a brain hemmorage.
Version 13 (Score:2, Informative)
There was AutoCAD Release 13 back in the day.
Starcraft maps (Score:5, Interesting)
I release several games as custom maps in Starcraft. Many of them are refinements of earlier versions made by others. And all of them are released unprotected so that others may add their own refinements.
Version numbers get messy. I typically go to the next major number if I'm doing a serious overhaul of my own or somebody else's map. Then I increment the minor numbers for bug fixes, balance changes, and minor enhancements.
But then somebody else comes along, makes a minor (and often terrible) change and releases it as the next major version. Or they make major changes and release it as the next minor version. Then when I make a new version, it either clashes with those other versions or looks older than the versions released with big jumps.
I've tried adding descriptor names to my versions, a la Vista. So I have "Phantom BGH Gold 1.0" as my refinement of "Phantom BGH 2.4", but most people don't seem to get that. When my updates landed me at "Phantom BGH Gold 3.0" people at least paid attention that it might be newer, but they still complained that it was different than "Phantom BGH 2.4".
I also tried adding "Classic" to a game version which was a totally rewritten implementation of a game type with other versions in the 3.0 to 9.0 range. I intended the "Classic" to signify I was focusing on the core ideas of the game type, but so many people thought it meant "old". As if the first version ever released of that map was labeled "Classic", and a label of "New" means new forever.
TheNevermind
Reason vs Politics (Score:3, Interesting)
Engineers usually have a legit reason to brand a public version number... the next release, and the number indicates the level of importance. So far, so good.
But then marketing and politics get into play.. and if you're in the business, these are good things to know. Sometimes it's just marketing... the DECT cordless phone standard somehow mutated version 1.6 into version 6... I guess that sounds more grown up in the marketplace. But it's also the first time they were using "DECT" as a buzzword in their marketing. No harm, no foul.
Other times, it's keeping up with the joneses. Some have a method to their madness.. I use lots of Sony Media Software tools... you pay once for any major version, all of the minor versions in that release are free updates.. not just bug fixes, sometimes including new features. New one comes out, you can decide to upgrade or not... if you skip a version, you still get an upgrade price on the one after that. I'm really happy with the way these guys do business.
At other times, something as stupid as a version number can become a billion-dollar weapon. This only happens when idiots are involved in contract law, I think, but it's happened. My classic example: MacOS and the open Mac platform. I was designing this kind of hardware in 1996-1997, the PReP, I mean CHRP, er, umm, I mean PPCP standard for Mac compatibility. This was largely at the urging of Apple's CHRP (um.. whatever) group, whom we (PIOS Computer AG, Hildesheim, Germany) met with in January of '97.
So, like Power Computing, UMAX, IBM, Motorola, and others, we're off making a standard PowerPC platform machine. Maybe it should have been clear, after meeting at Apple and seeing that a Mot Starmax they had on-hand was the fastest Mac every recorded... at this side of an Amiga 3000 running a Mac emulator (a previous project of mine... the A3K, not the Mac emulator). Jobsie wouldn't like this, would he?
So Jobs comes back, and like magic, at the Mac Conference in September, they announce MacOS 8... which is MacOS 7.6.something with a new name. And guess what... Motorola and IBM, the two big, old-school, real serious companies with more lawyers than PIOS Computer had employees (by some orders of magnitude, I suspect) had left a huge, ugly, gaping hole in the contracts they negotiated with Apple for MacOS... Apple gets to renegotiate the contract, completely and totally, on major revisions of the OS. But they get to decide the definiton of a major release of the OS!
They didn't really cancel MacOS licensing then.. I don't think even IBM and Motorola were stupid enough to have allowed that. But it was only a small functional difference... Apple was going to licence MacOS based on the CPU in the box.. the faster, the more expensive. My little startup had produced the first full systems shipping at 300MHz (there may have been "accelerator boards" before then, but we integrated the system... we bought motherboards from UMAX and designed our own CPU cards)... that would have been something like $500 per MacOS version to license, despite the fact you could buy it off-the-shelf for like $75.
I think this is also a good lesson for any engineer allowing lawyers to do things that have major impact on their future business course. Nothing I could have done about this, but after losing something like $100 million on the while Mac Clone thing, one would hope Motorola learned that hard-bought lesson. I do note they have "literally hundreds" of engineers working on Android-based cell phone stuff. Yeah, that ought to be a bit safer...
a cautionary tale (Score:3, Insightful)
at my last company, i was part of the new R&D department intended to make us no
Metals (Score:3, Funny)
Gold, Platinum, Platinum Plus were all substitutes for proper versioning in the 1980s and probably 1990s. This is parodied by many a perl script,
$ua->agent("Schmozilla/v9.14 Platinum"); # give it time, it'll get there
Netscape/Mozilla versions (Score:4, Informative)
This was not as arbitrary as one might think. Toward the end of NS4's actual development cycle, there was an attempt to wring another major version out of that codebase, and it was called Mozilla 5. Eventually it was abandoned because the new NGLayout engine (now known as Gecko) was much better than the clunky old Mosaic-derived codebase. The NG stuff became the basis for Netscape versions 6 through 8, the Mozilla Suite, Firefox, Thunderbird, and lots of other things.
I know there are some Netscape/Mozilla folks around here who could correct/expand that story.
Slackware (Score:3, Informative)
Slackware Linux [slackware.com] skipped from 4.0 to 7.0, because they wanted number parity with RedHat and other popular distros.
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V0.1 Basic - you don't really want this cuz we crippled it so you would buy our more expensive packages
V0.1 Premium - just enough of a taste to make you horny for more features in our Platinum package
V0.1 Professional - we stripped out some the the cool stuff and added some features for buisness that you will never use
V0.1 Platinum - this is the best one yet! you get everything!(almost) it will even make you coffee and pancakes and walk your dog!
V0.1 So awesome we can't eve
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Most people are able to read a sentence such as 'The full stop delimits different version numbers rather than acting as a decimal point.' and understand completely.
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No mention of TeX version numbering? (Asymptotically approaching pi?)
Err.... You *did* realize there were three pages in the article ? TeX is at the bottom of page 2.
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This was brought up in the article. It is a great way to do it if you are only adding bug fixes (like in the case of TeX). The goal of TeX is to be bug-free just like the goal of the version is to be Ï. You can keep getting closer and closer and never really get there.
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When DEK dies, TeX's version number is set to $\pi$ (and Metafont's version number to $\varepsilon$, incidentally). Then there are no bugs in this applications any more, by definition, then these are canonical features.
Not that it will really matter, really few folks use DEK's original TeX program anymore -- we'll probably all using LuaTeX by then...
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
No, there was a Windows NT 4.0, and it wasn't just in name... it had some major architectural changes over NT 3.5.
After that, brother, I'm with you. Windows 2000 was NT 4.something with tweaks to match the look and feel of Windows 98SE/ME/MOUSE/whatever. That wasn't a bad thing... it was as stable, give or take, as NT 4... I just had a problem with having to pay for a service pack. Maybe this is Windows 5.. or 4.something in actual fact?
XP didn't at the time seem like much more than Win2K with additional su
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
It isn't a proper version number. Many in between has been skipped, like going from 290 to 330.