some legacy software checked if the OS name began with “Windows 9” to differentiate between 95 and future versions.
This is a myth. Windows doesn’t even have an API to give you the marketing name of the OS. Internally, Windows 95 is version 4.0 and Windows 98 is 4.1. The API to get the version returns the major and minor version separately, so to check for Windows 95 you’d check if majorVersion = 4 and minorVersion = 0.