The Windows NT Workstation operating system has passed another milestone. Last year, for the first time, unit shipments of workstations based on Microsoft Corp.'s Windows NT operating system surpassed those for Unix-based workstations, according to International Data Corp.'s preliminary figures for the year.
In prior years, the NT workstation growth rate had outpaced that for Unix, but 1997 was the first year that the absolute number of NT workstation shipments was higher than Unix, according to IDC. The company said that in 1997, 1.3 million workstations equipped with NT were sold. This is an increase of 80% over the previous year, compared with 660,000 units of Unix, or a decline of 7%. In 1996 the number of shipments of the operating systems was about even.
The rise of NT has made Hewlett-Packard Co. to the No. 1 seller of workstations, beating out Sun Microsystems, Inc. This is because while HP sells both Unix and NT workstations, Sun sells only Unix - and NT is outselling Unix. However, because Unix machines generally are priced higher than NT machines, Sun still is the leading vendor of workstations in terms of revenues.
On the server side, NT shipments also were higher than Unix shipments last year, for the second year in a row.
