On the Bluesky social media platform, veteran Microsoft engineer, Larry Osterman, explained why the codename lingered. "It's another example of how code names leak into implementation," he said in a thread. "Drivers written for the NT driver model were labeled Windows NT. Drivers for the operating system eventually known as Win95 needed a way of distinguishing them from NT drivers."
"But what do you call drivers for Win95? You can't call them Win95 drivers - that name didn't exist yet. So they were tagged with the codename-chicago, and from that point on, the name couldn't be changed. Because otherwise it would break all the drivers."
"Sure. But why would a driver author using Chicago change? Chicago worked just fine. And this is for a piece of HARDWARE - it's expensive to update once it's manufactured. So Chicago remains..."
After Windows XP, there wasn't a functional distinction between the two; there was no separate NT and Win9x kernel. But the signature names lived on.
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