Different kernel. 95 was still DOS based. I believe a significant amount of stuff (especially drivers of course) which worked on one side didn’t work on the other.
XP was the “merger” - the first NT based system for the consumer market.
XP was the “merger” - the first NT based system for the consumer market.
You're thinking of Windows 2000. Win2K was released before Windows ME, and was widely sold on consumer market computers. When ME came out, and was pretty terrible, Win2K remained as the popular consumer option.
A lot of people did use it on home computers (myself included) but the target was still businesses. XP had TV ads and colorful themes, and all that, while Windows 2000… Didn’t. (Well maybe on C-SPAN or something) And the most basic (major) edition was “Professional” instead of something like “Home” as XP had.
I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the big box computer makers did ship with it to home users, but it wasn’t “meant” for them.
The googles tells me that Win2K was released Feb 17, 2000, and that ME was released Sep 14, 2000. Plenty of time for word to get out about how much better 2000 was than 9x even for home use.
Ah but in reality that wasn’t entirely the case, direct X compatible drivers were a big sticking point basically until XP came along. Windows 2000 was fantastic as a productivity OS, but it wasn’t fully there for the home user yet
I do recall that for some heavier (in 2000 lol) gaming, people stuck with 9x for a while longer, until better gaming support for 2K came around at least.
It was also a lot more expensive than Windows 9x/me, so most consumer desktops went that way. The only people running 2000 were professionals and nerds that weren’t running Linux.
Oh sure - the intent was for it to be a business-centric OS, it definitely was not flashy, but it was just so much better than 9x that plenty of computer makers made it available, and lots of people chose it over 98SE.
NT was a parallel line of “professional” windows. It had a different kernel or something. There were equivalent versions to most of the home releases.
The first release was NT 3.1, to match version numbers with the home OS.
NT 4 was the professional version of win 95/98.
In the year 2000 Microsoft released both Windows ME, and Windows 2000. ME for the home, 2000 was the NT release for the workplace.
The products were merged with windows XP, now all windows is windows NT.
The version numbering makes sense if you count by the NT version numbers. 2000/ME is version 5, therefore XP is 6, and if you pretend Vista never existed (as you should for your own sanity) you get to windows 7 and it all starts to make sense.
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