I remember reading an interview or a biography of Tridgell that talks of him writing the code for what became Samba before Linux had existed, for I think interop between Microsoft and DEC.
IIRC Samba started out working on interop with DEC Pathworks, which was somewhat compatible SMB implementation (devil in the details, Pathworks predates SMB ossifying into what it became in NT4 when there was a lot of customization by vendors).
This meant that early versions were compatible with Pathworks servers but not Windows ones (but Windows could be configured to work with Pathworks)
IIRC Samba started out working on interop with DEC Pathworks, which was somewhat compatible SMB implementation (devil in the details, Pathworks predates SMB ossifying into what it became in NT4 when there was a lot of customization by vendors).
This meant that early versions were compatible with Pathworks servers but not Windows ones (but Windows could be configured to work with Pathworks)