Random bits out of my memory in no particular order, except the first one:

First and foremost Linux was free, no money, no licenses, no procurement procedures, download and install.

Windows insisted to have a GUI even on servers and you had to remote desktop to them and click click click. That was how most of the world was using those NT 3.51 boxes.

It soon became PHP vs ASP and Java run on both OSes equally well.

There were still many Unix developers around and they picked up Linux at least as a deployment target.

Web servers were developed for Unix first. Porting to Linux was trivial. Porting to Windows not so. We had to wait for IIS.

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simianwords 15 hours ago | parent [-]

> Windows insisted to have a GUI even on servers and you had to remote desktop to them and click click click. That was how most of the world was using those NT 3.51 boxes.

No way. Why didn’t they have the foresight to see this was a bad idea?

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cjs_ac 14 hours ago | parent [-]

Microsoft is called Microsoft because they make software for microcomputers. Networking and multi-user systems aren’t in their DNA.

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simianwords 14 hours ago | parent [-]

Didn’t you just need one person to say something like requiring human intervention to provision servers is not scalable? It doesn’t require an expert to think of this really.

	▲	pmontra 13 hours ago \| parent [-]
		To be fair to them, one or two servers were enough for basically every single service back in the 90s when consumers started moving to the internet. Microsoft sold what they had. Their customers bought what they were used to. The usual stack was a mainframe or an AS400 exporting a file full of records. A Windows NT PC imported the file in either Oracle or SQL Server and served HTML pages either with ASP or Java. Then export from the local db, import into the AS400. The internet facing system was a bolted on afterthought. Of course it was still a pain compared to command line, unless you grew up with only a Windows PC or a Mac under your fingers. No CLI on Macs until Apple rebuilt the OS on Unix so you didn't even know what a CLI was.