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"I lived through the era of Windows trouncing Unix." On servers? There was no such era! Windows never dominated the server market. Sure, there were some com
by gnosis 14y ago
"I lived through the era of Windows trouncing Unix."
On servers? There was no such era! Windows never dominated the server market. Sure, there were some companies that were Windows shops, but most servers were and still are unix/linux.
"A major reason why it happened is because people were familiar with Windows on their desktop and found the gui tools easier to use on their servers."
This might be true for mom & pop shops where the servers were run by desktop users, but on the enterprise level where corporations could afford their own sysadmins, Windows is and always has been a minor player.
- jrabone 14y agoAre you sure about that? Novell / NT Domains, then subsequently Active Directory has been a big part of every large corporation I've worked at over the last 20 years. Externally the web servers might be UNIX, but internally the infrastructure is heterogenous and the office stuff (authentication, email, etc.) lives on Windows.
- dagw 14y agoEvery major corporation I've run into in the past decade is deeply invested in MS Exchange and Active Directory and all the server infrastructure that brings with it. Sure the company home page might be served off a Linux box, but inside the company Windows Servers tend to rule.
- rogerbinns 14y agoYou'll find the small and medium business especially back then adopting Windows servers. I can assure you they were not adopting Sun (Solaris), HP/UX, Dec Alphas etc. SCO was fairly successful (Compaq sold about a billion dollars a year of hardware for SCO Unix), and a major reason was because SCO offered graphical administration. But Windows NT was killing that. (Note I worked for SCO but not in the operating systems group.) Even for the Enterprises you'd find widespread Windows NT adoption. Sure some core backend servers ran Unix but the servers users used were predominantly Windows.