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> no one ever actually did.

There is an example further down that thread:

https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/2hwlrk/comment/...

https://issues.jenkins-ci.org/secure/attachment/18777/Platfo...

    /** Performs computation and returns the result, or throws some exception. */
    public HashSet<String> call() throws Exception {
        final String arch = System.getProperty("os.arch");
        String name = System.getProperty("os.name").toLowerCase();
        String version = System.getProperty("os.version");
        if (name.equals("solaris") || name.equals("SunOS")) {
            name = "solaris";
        } else if (name.startsWith("windows")) {
            name = "windows";
            if (name.startsWith("windows 9")) {
                if (version.startsWith("4.0")) {
                    version = "95";
                } else if (version.startsWith("4.9")) {
                    version = "me";
                } else {
                    assert version.startsWith("4.1");
                    version = "98";
                }
            } else {
    ...



I suppose Java didn't offer too many alternatives to checking the OS version the standard way, but I really have a hard time imagining MS bending over backwards to support that approach on that platform. There wasn't even a need to check for the "windows 9", the code was already checking for a Windows platform and would have worked the same without it. Avoiding confusion in the minds of the end users is still the most plausible explanation to me.




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