June 7, 1997 was the crucial day for Winamp since this is the day when Winamp 1.006 was released. There was a spectrum analyzer, and a volume slider which could change colors as you move it left or right, but there was no waveform display as we know it today. The company which made this amazing media player Nullsoft, was founded in January 1998, which is 6 months after the release of Winamp. They had no idea that their product is going to be that successful and popular.
In March 1998, millions of people all over the world, and mostly in the United States who have been using Winamp to listen to the music, had a chance to try a new 1.90 version which was the first media player which has been used as a general purpose player. This version had two input plugins and those were MP3 and MOD. Also, you could find a visualization plugin as well. Only 18 days later, users could try the new 1.91 version which included plugins for Wave, CDDA and Windows tray handling. That is the day when Wesley Willis said that famous “Winamp, it really whips the lama’s ass”.
On September 8, 1998, Winamp 2 saw the light of the day, and those versions beginning with the number 2 became popular even more than the previous versions and quite quickly Winamp became one of the most popular media players on the market. It was more than hard to find a player which was more popular, and it is amazing how quickly that happened. That is the year when Winamp started using skins, and the users all over the world like it more than anything before.
When MP3 formats became extremely popular around 2002, Winamp released the third version of the player, which was called Winamp3, since the main goal was to include the phrase MP3 in the name of the player, and that made it even more popular if that was even possible back 
then. The main difference was a different codebase. It looked like the version 2 but it was completely different. There were many additional features and it was more than easy to use Winamp. Flexibility was one of the main keywords when it comes to describing this version of Winamp.
It is interesting that there are no Winamp 4 versions of this player since the guys from Nullsoft made a joke saying that no one wants a foreskin (4 skin). And that is how Winamp 5 was released on the market soon and that basically meant that Winamp 2 and Winamp 3 were fused into the latest version of this media player. There were some similarities with Winamp 2 but still it was a completely new media player and the difference was obvious to everybody who have been using this media player before. That happened in December 2003, and from that day on, Winamp kept changing, but it always stayed the same.