Windows 10: Qurious question regarding NT

NT was a good OS for it's time. There is no denying that it was difficult to use but that was true for virtually any OS of the period. The system resources available in a typical computer just did not permit the features we now take for granted. NT 3.1 (the first NT OS) was designed to work with only 12 MB RAM on a workstation, 16 MB for a server. Today this is nothing but at the time many considered these requirements excessive. Right up to NT 4 the RAM requirements never changed, just as with Vista to Windows 10.

Better technology enabled building a more user friendly OS, such as was Windows 2000. Minimum RAM requirement was 32 MB but 64 MB was more realistic. Many thought that excessive. But it was a huge improvement over NT 4. In comparison XP was only a minor upgrade. But in the way of things XP became popular and Windows 2000 all but forgotten.

In the past Microsoft has been reluctant to change the major version of an OS, maintaining it at 6 from Vista to Windows 8. This was done, not because the changes in the OS didn't warrant a higher version number, but for compatibility reasons. There were always applications that managed to get the version check wrong and failed to run on an OS that was fully capable of supporting it. Updating only the minor version number minimized this problem but this was of course not a long term solution. Once you have made the decision to change the major version there are no further compatibility constraints and it can be set to whatever is desired. 10 is a reasonable major version number for Windows 10. Skipping version numbers is hardly a new thing.

 

The OS version is 10 and I think MS stated somewhere that the kernel version would register the same, probably with the final release.