Sounds like OSX/macOS.

Do we want huge changes every few years over minor tweaks and improvements? Like the basics of most phone OS are pretty functional and standard at this stage.

Nah, they just used the entire number.

Are we discussing Bruce Willis movies now?

🤣 People still believe in talking to imaginary friends with superpowers. Magic numbers are tame by comparison.

I went to the US in 2013 and there were still a lot of hotels (and I think some other places but I'm not sure) that skipped the 13th floor and room number 13

In china, absolutely. Phone numbers, license plates, condo building floors etc. 8 is good and those fetch high price and 4 is avoided. Hell the US is still sometimes avoiding floor 13 in hotels.

There used to be a US highway 666. It was renumbered to 491 back in 2003 due to 666 being associated with the mark of the beast.

When I worked at a restaurant and someone’s order came to $6.66, they would sometimes add or remove items to prevent that order total. Always made me chuckle.

I’m not superstitious. Heck, I’m not even a little stitious.

That makes sense.

USB 1,2,3,4 is the standard and relates to the speeds.

USB A, B, C, Micro, Mini refers to the shape.

Ha, urgh... the string checking thing is amusing. That's not even counting that ME was the last DOS based one, and there was NT 3.1, 3.5, and 4, then 2000 was NT 5.0... and XP and everything after that. Then internally XP was NT 5.1, 5.2, and Vista was NT 6. Windows 7? NT 6.1. Windows 8: NT 6.2. Then Windows 10? NT 10,0. Now the latest Windows 11 is uh, 23H2.

It’s absolutely not a made-up reason.

It was a way to get around the fact that Microsoft didn’t use proper version numbers for ages, and it became standard (enough) practice such that MS had to account for it if they didn’t want to break legacy support for a shitload of software that enterprises customers care about.

There's at least one example you can look at, the Jenkins CI project had code like that (if (name.startsWith("windows 9")) {):

https://issues.jenkins.io/secure/attachment/18777/PlatformDetail

Microsoft, for all their faults, do (or at least did) take backwards compatibility very seriously, and the option of "just make devs fix it" would never fly. Here's a story about how they added special code to Windows 95 to make SimCity's broken code work on it:

Windows 95? No problem. Nice new 32 bit API, but it still ran old 16 bit software perfectly. Microsoft obsessed about this, spending a big chunk of change testing every old program they could find with Windows 95. Jon Ross, who wrote the original version of SimCity for Windows 3.x, told me that he accidentally left a bug in SimCity where he read memory that he had just freed. Yep. It worked fine on Windows 3.x, because the memory never went anywhere. Here’s the amazing part: On beta versions of Windows 95, SimCity wasn’t working in testing. Microsoft tracked down the bug and added specific code to Windows 95 that looks for SimCity. If it finds SimCity running, it runs the memory allocator in a special mode that doesn’t free memory right away. That’s the kind of obsession with backward compatibility that made people willing to upgrade to Windows 95.

Can you imagine? "Microsoft demands all websites update their code for new operating system."

The alternative being "Why websites think your new computer is old."

Microsoft dodged all of that by skipping a version number and the worst question they get asked is "Where did Windows 9 go?"

They even had tshirts that said "Because 7 8 9".

It’s not websites, it was about local apps.

There are a bunch of 20 year old apps designed for Windows XP which would complain that Windows 9 is too old.

Enough to make Microsoft skip Windows 9. ;)