Windows used to have a version control called Visual Source Safe.

You'd have to select files you want to modify and check out them. Then they're locked. No one else in the team can touch them.

God forbid you forgot to check them in at the end of the day and are not at work for a week then those files are locked and don't even have your changes.

Yet to talk about branching.

Better then that was svn which was no less horrible.

So net result was that around 2000s, there was no concept and culture of version control for the windows developers. Pretty much. It was difficult to do, was cumbersome and such.

Then came git. Offline, distributed, instant branching without creating a whole copy of the project and what not. It came from Linux but it's ease of use and feature set made it defacto in Linux world.

But then came GitHub and that's when I guess most Windows Developers got to know about.

True story, I joined a team in late 2000s and their workflow was to literally FTP the code daily to production. They all were on Windows and didn't know any better.