Windows Millennium Edition, or Windows Me (marketed with the pronunciation of the pronoun "me"), is an operating system produced by Microsoft as part of the Windows 9x family of operating systems. It was the direct successor to Windows 98, and was released to manufacturing on June 19, 2000, with retail sales beginning on September 14, 2000. It was the last Windows version to be based on the Windows 95 kernel and MS-DOS, with its successor Windows XP being based on Microsoft's Windows NT kernel instead.