• partial_accumen@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    Non-MS Web servers and services have evolved significantly since IIS was originally introduced. Back in the mid 90s when the web was growing up authentication was significantly more primitive. Active Directory didn’t exist yet. OpenSSL didn’t even exist. Linux as an accepted business server was much more rare. Your options for OS were Windows, IBM (AS400 or AIX), SCO Unix, Netware, AT&T or Berkley Unix, and a few others mainframe OSes.

    Among other things, IIS allowed a way to leverage existing user directories for auth on top of an OS you already had deployed and supported in your org. It was a simple, primitive, horrible insecure and exciting time.