If you look at the graph of web server market share on Netcraft's site, you can see that Apache ramped up really quickly in the late 90s and stayed ahead of IIS

If you look at the graph of web server market share on Netcraft's site, you can see that Apache ramped up really quickly in the late 90s and stayed ahead of IIS until Nginx started making real inroads. https://news.netcraft.com/archives/category/web-server-survey/ https://news.netcraft.com/archives/category/web-server-surve... The vast majority of these web servers were running on Linux. NetBSD was a very niche OS from about the early 2000s on, and far from common before that. Up until about '97 or so most web servers seemed to be running on NT4 or even Windows 95 (which was in itself a fairly terrible idea but they were simpler times).