If you use Windows today and type ls, cat, grep, or awk in a terminal, there is a good chance something useful will happen. That was not always true. For most of the history of personal computing, Unix/Linux and Windows lived on opposite sides of a cultural border. Unix people had pipes, small composable tools, shell scripts, make, sed, awk, grep, tar, and the idea that everything was a file. Windows people had drive letters, backslashes, COMMAND.COM or cmd.exe, and an API that did not care much about what POSIX thought.
Yet there has always been a demand for Unix tools on Windows. Some of it came from programmers who wanted the same build scripts everywhere. Some came from administrators who missed grep and...
