Unix was king in the 80s, maybe early 90s for anyone doing terminals, banks, government and universities were all ok the big iron train. But when nt3.1 and 3.5 came out, if you were a business not looking into it, you felt like you were behind the times. We had DEC and iris at our house, so weren't in a good position to switch, but it wasn't long before the change happened.
The only places where NT managed to succeed on server room have been Microsoft shops, or places where .NET was adopted as the main development stack.
Workstations is another matter.
In the 80's many banks were either on mainframes/micros, or using stuff like Novel Netware.
.NET came out well after NT was replaced with windows 2000 (unless you claim that 2000, and thus XP and later windows OSes were also NT)
> In the 80's many banks were either on mainframes/micros, or using stuff like Novel Netware.
In my experience in the late 90s NT crushed Netware. It rode the wave of computerisation of SMEs and gained massive amounts of users (with desktop often being 3.11 onwards rather than NT).
Until then it was all about ASP, Outlook, and SMB shares, nothing else.
All big stuff was on UNIX.
Again, when talking about the server room.
From 1999 to 2003, I was doing project delivery across Aix, Solaris, HP-UX, Windows NT/2000, so I might have an idea of how our customer based actually had their server rooms configured.
Likewise the university campus was wired to DG/UX, Solaris, eventually Red-Hat came into the picture as DG/UX server died.
Computer labs desktops were a mixture Windows 9X, NT, Mac and some lucky professors had a couple of NeXT Cubes, which they eventually replaced by Red-Hat (before Apple's aquisition).
So to each their own 1990's anecdote.