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Comment by paulddraper | Hacker News Reader

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paulddraper·

I'm surprised to see some of the most popular software of all time not be mentioned: Windows and Microsoft Office.

Also, for a more technical audience, the C, C++, and EcmaScript specifications.

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That's just how Office is marketed, the executables still use plain old versions.

See: office 2019 being released in 2018

Also Visual Studio 97, 2005, 2008, 2010, 2012, 2013, 2015, 2017, 2019.

Visual Studio arguably is SemVer based. Visual Studio 2017 is currently at version 15.7.2.

Windows goes something like this (there's no real straight line, feel free to add your own progression):

3.11, 95, 98, ME, 2000, XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10

I wouldn't call that a pattern.

The marketing name is different from software versions. The versions, while not entirely linear, do progress in a sane manner.

https://www.gaijin.at/en/lstwinver.php

Yeah, there are multiple products there (e.g. ME and 2000 were released at the same time).

Windows Server is what I was thinking of.

Windows

1, 2, 3, 95, 98, ME

Windows NT

3, 4, 2000, XP, Vista, 7, 8, 10

Windows NT Server

3, 4, 2000, 2003, 2008, 2012, 2016

Windows 10 versions are CalVer. The most recent release was 1803. Previous versions were 1709, 1703, 1609, etc.

I think office is a bit different as it is an end user software rather than a library. Operating systems (especially Windows) have very good backwards compatibility so there is usually not much need to be able to specify a compatible version beyond the major release number/name.

Also missing: every Adobe product since the move to a subscription model. Sorta. They still retain an internal sequential version number; Illustrator CC 2018 = 22.0.0, for instance.

They're all on the Users page: https://calver.org/users.html

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