The hoopla over Windows 7’s version continues! I want to get this right and it looks like Ed Bott has the best explanation so far about how Microsoft came to reach the 7th release of Windows. The kernel version seems to be what is confusing persons the most. Because Vista is NT 6.0 and Windows 7 is NT 6.1 not NT 7.0 persons are getting confused. The key as Ed notes is not include the consumer Windows 1x, 2x, 3x and 9x releases.
Quote:
“A few people are wondering how you get to “the seventh version” and thus qualify for the Windows 7 moniker. I don’t know the answer definitively, but can easily get to that point if I count only members of the NT family with numbers attached to their names: Windows NT 3.1 (yep, that was the very first release), 3.5, 4.0, 2000, XP, Vista. That’s six, making the next release number 7. If you try to count using the consumer versions from the Windows 9X family (or the barely usable Windows 1 and 2 releases), you’ll quickly go mad.”
Resources:
Teching It Easy 