Windows was more prominent and didn’t have a real cli culture, Internet Explorer was still king back then. Dedicated Linux servers were expensive, virtual serve

Windows was more prominent and didn’t have a real cli culture, Internet Explorer was still king back then. Dedicated Linux servers were expensive, virtual servers didn’t really exist, most people spinning up VPSs today would only have been able to afford shared PHP hosting with no shell access. And most importantly, web development was much simpler back then.