So recently I discovered the ver command* and I was very fascinated how it has existed since as far back as MS-DOS 2, which as I understand it, makes it the oldest way of querying the version of Windows running. So I decided to take some screenshots of ver running in different versions of MS-DOS and Windows. I find it interesting to see how the version is exactly reported, I won't spoil but there are a few interesting surprises in what ver reports, and along the way you can also see how the command prompt has changed as well.
*I know you're probably wondering how I didn't know about it until now, but I don't use Windows day-to-day so don't at me
I will wait some time before posting part 2 and 3 as I don't want to spam the subreddit with my screenshots, but if you are interested then stay tuned!
Some observations:
-PC/MS-DOS 1.x does not have the ver command
-MS-DOS 2.12 contains OEM branding, in this example it is Compaq's branding, prior to MS-DOS 3.20, Microsoft did not sell a generic MS-DOS version, there were only OEM versions. For some reason there is also an extra space before the version number.
-MS-DOS 3.x and onwards all output the same format of "MS-DOS Version x.xx", much cleaner than MS-DOS 2.x
-DOS based Windows does not modify the ver command, and the output corresponds to whatever DOS version is running underneath.
Observations of command prompt:
-Interestingly, Windows 1.01 has a Windows 10/11 style alt+enter, that just full screens the application rather than switching to text mode. Windows 2.0's command prompt has no alt+enter functionality whatsoever.
-Windows/386 2.1 is the first version to allow the user to switch to text mode, while I am not certain, this may be down to running in protected mode, I say this because Windows 3.0 only allows switching out of text mode in the 386 enhanced mode. Though that is backwards to how Windows 1.0 and Windows/286 handled it, so I am uncertain if this is why.
-Windows 3.x command prompts start in text mode and can be switched to windowed mode with alt+enter, this is the reverse of all other versions.