At our university we did choose FreeBSD in the early 90ies. Because it was exactly that. Secure and stable. Novell was also secure and stable, but it was not fr

At our university we did choose FreeBSD in the early 90ies. Because it was exactly that. Secure and stable. Novell was also secure and stable, but it was not free. We used both. Linux at that time was used by a few of our servers, but it was certainly not that secure. VMS was also ok, but not that popular. IRIX and friends were too expensive.