As it has just turned 16 years since the release of the first “NT” version of Windows, I thought it would be interesting to have a quick overview of the major releases and service packs to show the evolution of Windows up to today.

I have deliberately omitted some variants to avoid it being too cluttered (e.g. IA64, Home Server, Embedded, Windows for Legacy PC versions), and my exposure to NT started with 4.0 so I don’t know the dates for the service packs in 3.5 and 3.51.

The entries have been roughly grouped by common kernel, and the “Kernel” column is the version at release (build numbers omitted for brevity).

E&OE ;)