LAN Manager Product Specification, 1987 | Hacker News Reader

LAN Manager Product Specification, 1987

os2museum.com

43 pointskencausey12 comments

It is an interesting piece of history. This dates back from when MS thought that all networking should be peer-to-peer (and that 640K was a lot of memory). IBM knew better and built domain controllers into OS/2.

As an anecdote - I worked on the team that was sub-contracted by IBM to write this. The spec was considered super secret and so had to be kept under lock and key. IBM security would confiscate any loose documents and leave a red card. One red card is a warning, two and you're off the project, three and the project is cancelled.

We'd just had a red card so were on alert when, late one evening, we discovered an unlocked cupboard on the final sweep. So we saved the spec in another cuprboard and for a joke left the old red card behind. The PM, who's spec it was, came in early the next day - obviously before the devs who left late the night before, found the red card and phoned security to get it back.

The ensuing "YOU'VE LOST THE SECRET SPEC!" conversation spiralled around like crazy until we came in and managed to calm everybody down. The PM still had to do a lot of grovelling. Moral of the story - probably best not to attempt a joke with anything security related.

It's not just about security related things. This is generally a danger of pulling a prank when you're not around to observe how it unfolds. You can't step in and stop it before it goes down some unexpected side track and involves too many people.

I never used LANMAN, but the spec makes for some interesting reading...

> NOTE: Due to a temporary restriction in CMD.EXE, it is not possible to use the DIR command on a UNC pathname, as in DIR \ \BIGSERVE\ANYNAME. This will be fixed in a future release. The DosFindFirst API call will accept UNC pathnames.

I always wondered about this... apparently the restriction carried over to the Windows port and was never fixed... maybe they didn't want to bloat cmd.exe with needing to "NET USE" UNC paths behind the scenes? Who knows!

But dir does support UNC paths in cmd on windows, doesn't it?

I’m pretty sure dir \\server\share has worked in cmd.exe since os2 1.1

Can't `cd` into it though, making it somewhat useless.

It's time to drop cmd and use powershell, cd is an alias of set-location which handles this fine:

    PS C:\>cd \\server\share
    PS Microsoft.PowerShell.Core\FileSystem::\\server\share>

I have no need for windows in over a decade.

tip - if you want to cd into a UNC path, you can't; but you can pushd into one and it'll create a temporary drive letter mapping and unmap it when you popd out

Where were you and your helpful tips 30 years ago when such knowledge would have been actually handy? :-) Cool tip, though.

Direct link to PDF : http://www.os2museum.com/files/docs/os210sdk/lanman-prod-spe...

As a new-ish PM, I find it fascinating to read specs like these. Gives me valuable ideas on how the specs I write should look like. Fellow HN readers : Got any other good spec sheets you have seen?

better late than never

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