Presumably because "windows" wasn't a term used to describe an OS. They didn't trademark "OS".
That's the landscape all the trademark suits happened in.
Footnote: Windows 95/98/ME was still DOS + Windows bundled in one box. Windows XP was the first consumer operating system derived from Windows NT (which was in fact a proper operating system in its own right). Even Windows NT was trademark-iffy. It was a play on VMS (get it? If not, increment each letter).
Windows XP was the first convergence version, where the home / consumer / client line transitioned to the NT codebase (with Windows Server 2003 still continuing the NT server market line, but now on a common codebase, and with some of the more workstation uses moving down to the XP line).
At the time, there was a split between "desktop" and "workstation" which no longer really exists. High-end consumers also sometimes bought machines from e.g. SGI, Digital, HP, or Sun. That whole class of machine kind of disappeared, and now there's a smooth gradient from a $100 computer to one with 196GB RAM, an array of professional NVidia GPUs, and 128 CPU cores.
Workstations had memory protection, pre-emptive multitasking, access controls, proper networking stacks, more sophisticated memory address spaces, were multiuser by design, etc.
i mean, i used both at the time, but they were bought for me at ludicrous prices by the companies i worked/consulted for.
windows 2k was something you could buy that ran on consumer grade hardware, and was bloody good. it morphed into xp, which is my point about which came first.
Yes. I had plenty of friends who did. Mostly from, very likely, similar companies like the ones you worked / consulted for when they upgraded. It turns out that despite the ludicrous prices new, last-generation workstations sold for a song, or were often just found in trash piles.
Corporate workstation markets aren't big into buying used. Supply and demand.
At the time, the gap between a modern Wintel and a previous-generation DEC Alpha (for compute) or IRIX (for 3D) was quite large, and not in Intel's favor. X + twm or similar was much more snappy than either NT or XP. And you had the full power of Unix.
Also: Multihead. Optical mice. Etc.
I had one particular a friend -- a student without more income than you'd expect of a student -- who had a whole roomful of older Suns, and probably a few Vaxes (which everyone hated).
It's like HAL, the computer in Arthur C. Clarke's "2001: A Space Odyssey", where HAL is before IBM.
> It has been suggested that Dave Cutler intended the initialism "WNT" as a play on VMS, incrementing each letter by one. However, the project was originally intended as a follow-on to OS/2 and was referred to as "NT OS/2" before receiving the Windows brand. One of the original NT developers, Mark Lucovsky, states that the name was taken from the original target processor—the Intel i860, code-named N10 ("N-Ten").
I can't figure out what this is referring to, though. Maybe you can do better.
- VMS developer develops WNT, playfully incrementing each letter of his prior OS from former employer, based on similar concepts.
- Corporate lawyers.
- Obvious explanation vehemently denied.
- Alternative explanations abound.
You can believe what you want. I chose Occam's Razor.