[smackeyacky]

This is pretty much correct. Windows NT was far better than DOS and feature competitive with the Unices of the time, along with being available on more modest hardware.

The Unix wars were also raging, and compatibility between Unices still hadn't been sorted out (and arguably never was) so a company with workstation class software had to port their code between mostly compatible operating systems and wildly incompatible GUI frameworks. So shipping an NT product wasn't the big deal that it seemed.

[tombert]

That makes sense; even within the Linux world in the year of our lord 2025, binary compatibility is still kind of an issue. I have had issues getting regular Linux binaries working in NixOS [1], and even getting stuff working between Ubuntu and OpenSUSE and Fedora can be a pain.

It totally makes sense why developers would see Windows NT as the future here; it gave you most of the features you'd want from Unix-land (and I think some new stuff too that wasn't available in Unix?), and having "platform to rule them all" is appealing to most developers for obvious reasons. It doesn't hurt that Win32 isn't too hard to code against (at least it wasn't when I played with it 15 years ago).

I do find it a bit strange that there wasn't really a "de facto" Unix that people coded against, like a clear winner that people liked, but I guess if the hardware was too expensive to run it, that's going to cut down on usage; we didn't really get "standard Unix" until OS X.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42703720

[actionfromafar]

The open source Unixes were tied up in license wars right at the moment Linux became stable.