Pentium 4 Computers Do Not Know How To Count

published sep 2001

As evidenced by the two most recent Windows releases (Me and XP), the old ways of releasing by version number and then by year are no longer in use by software giant Microsoft. This may appear to be a standard ploy to get people excited about another boring software release, but a Microsoft programmer who has been refused stock options recently revealed the gaping necessity which caused the change in naming convention. This programmer wishes to remain anonymous since despite the inaccessibility of stock options, he still pulls a significant salary from the company. For convenience, he allows himself to be referenced as "Bill," but also expresses desire not to be confused with Mr. Gates, whom Bill assures us he is not.

Apparently in the days of Windows 3.x, the version number was coded as a floating-point decimal, which worked fine except for the case of Windows 3.11, which simply had too many decimal places to be practical. With Windows 95 came the release-by-year to replace the less informative release-by-version. Bill admits that nobody remembers when Windows 3.0 was released anyway, because "frankly, we just don't care."

The network division of Windows (NT), however, continued to release under version number because networks are always running really old releases of Windows anyway. It was not considered important to include a release year for Windows NT until a developer other than Bill, overly concerned over the upcoming Y2K incident, felt it necessary to name the next Windows release with a 4-digit year. The next release just happened to be part of the NT division, and was released as Windows 2000, which left no indication that it was in fact a network release.

It just so happened that this release also gave rise to a problem even larger than the problem of consumer confusion caused by this being the first release of Windows NT not clearly labeled NT. Unlike Windows 95 and Windows 98, Windows 2000 requires more space since it stores a 4-digit year. The version number or the year (whichever is used) needs to be stored in practically every program that is to be run in a particular release of Windows, and there had not previously been enough room to store a 4-digit year. Of course Microsoft was not about to release a version of Windows that did not work correctly, so a workaround was added to correct this feature while sacrificing much of the speed improvements that otherwise would have been made with that release.

The release of Windows Me is Microsoft's abandonment of release practices involving any sort of number, though Me does seem to imply 2000 as it appears to stand for "millennium edition" when pronounced "emm ee" and not "me." Microsoft claims that most people have not updated their web browsers since Internet Explorer 3.0 and thus have no need to know when a particular copy of Windows was released. The presence of numbers reportedly make today's average computer user quite uncomfortable because numbers look like math.

The next Windows release will be Windows XP, changed from an earlier proposed title of Windows 2004, which was supposed to give it a more high-tech and futuristic feel, at least until the next Windows release. Besides wanting it to "not look like math," Microsoft also claims that the new Pentium 4 processors appear to handle letters better than numbers. "We think they can't count," Bill tells us. The Pentium 4's alleged inability to count appears to be Microsoft's main reason for moving away from numbered releases, at least internally. Externally, they want to appear more appealing by putting together cool-sounding yet surprisingly meaningless acronyms. "Most people don't have any clue what acronyms such as RAM, DVD, and HTTP stand for anyway, so it seemed perfectly acceptable to use acronyms that don't actually stand for anything in the first place."

It is also rumored that Bill Gates got the idea to label the next Windows release with 'XP' when he was in the local Wal-Mart a few years ago and noticed that all the cool Super Soakers said XP on them. If this is true, Super Soaker is likely to be bought out by Microsoft before 2002.