>>Remember DOS 4.0? I do, not fondly at all. That POS even managed to have duplicate directory entries. W95 was returning 4.0 on Os(), but it was officially an odd number... and most of its troubles were fixed in W98, aka 4.1... the Vista is 6.0, and then W7 is actually 6.1.
>>
>>The pattern is "any M$ OS with even number and dot zero is crap".
>
>Some disasters I remember with DOS 4.0 (Microsoft blames IBM for these)
>* Dos-shell -- more like dos-hell, rather kludgy w/ .COM, .EXE and .BAT components
>* Default install assumes new install -- it formatted drive w/o prompting
>* Incompatible FAT format (for partition > 32MB) -- especially deadly if you used certain disk tools (e.g. Norton Defrag)

I almost forgot those days. Sheesh... had any one of us made so many mistakes, we'd be out of business within a week.

>And let's not forget the DOS 6.0 disc compression -- it's OK as long as DON'T use Windows 2.x or 3.x with it.

W2.0 was a nightmare. I already had lots of experience with graphical shells - used GEM for DOS (on an Amstrad XT - remember those?) and Atari for a number of years, already had good reflexes with the mouse, but no, W2.0 was not even close. It was the first piece of software where I couldn't find a way to exit. It kept me clicking in circles, without any way to remember how I got to the current screen, nor a way to get back but by random clicking. I was totally lost within minutes.

>

>if ( WindowsVersion() < 0x3003 ) then  // make sure we're using at least v 3.30
>    messagebox "You need to upgrade Windows"
>    halt
>endif
>

Ouch.

>One thing that always bugged me about OS version was when you had utilities like DOSVER - which would configure the OS to lie. Though understandably this was added to get certain programs to work properly, it meant it was sometimes a pain to get the *real* version.

Ouch, 2.