1989 Networking: NetWare 386
os2museum.com
os2museum.com
I worked in Token Ring at the time. It was...less fun.
Windows Millennium Edition, everyone!
My memory is that 3.X could restart graphics if a crash happened there.
Novell responded with Netware Loadable Modules, but they weren’t as versatile and needed specialised knowledge/tools.
The way I remember it NLMs were pretty stable. Anything on Windows was not stable, userspace or otherwise. Netware's TUI was just as good as NT's GUI for what it needed to do. It wasn't a liability. Netware's superior directory service was more important.
Netware's demise was the transition from IPX to TCIP/IP and the explosion of the WWW. And from my perspective it wasn't really NT that knocked Netware down. It was Linux and Solaris. Novell kinda saw that coming and tried to figure out a future with SuSE. They just never got the combination of their directory server with Linux right in time. Microsoft stumbled around for some years, but they got their directory services figured out before Novell got their OS story straight in the new world.
NetWare was stable running vanilla file/print services (just don't load the AppleTalk module!), not so good with database services and so on.
LanMan is an opened-up version of 3Com's proprietary DOS-based server OS, 3+Share. I installed many 3+Share boxes in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAN_Manager
3+Share used NetBEUI but LanMan was protocol-neutral, which was rare and exceptional back then. E.g. AppleShare only ran over AppleTalk, Netware only ran over IPX/SPX, and Unix spoke unto Unix -- and nothing but Unix -- over TCP/IP. (Addons to run TCP/IP on other OSes existed but most of them cost money. Often more money than the OS itself, in the case of DOS. And many had proprietary APIs: so for example Quarterdeck DESQview/X used TCP/IP but it couldn't talk to the free TCP/IP stacks Microsoft and IBM eventually distributed. (Two different TCP/IP stacks, natch.)
LanMan ran on OS/2 1.x, on various proprietary Unixes, and on DEC VMS, which DEC marketed as part of its PATHWORKS suite: file/print serving via LanMan, plus Email, terminal emulation, X11 servers for DOS and Windows... all over the DecNet protocol.
I think this depends on what NLMs you were running. An old job had a NetWare 3.12 server running btrieve/pervasive and it ABENDed enough that I learned how to use the debugger to get the console back and dismount volumes to avoid triggering VREPAIR on restart.
That's because Microsoft hired Dave Cutler who previously worked on VMS and knew what he was doing. Microsoft even had their own Unix, but didn't know what to do with it.
For small to medium sized businesses Netware had the advantage that with IPX networking there was nearly no configuration necessary. No subnetting, assigning of IP addresses to clients or running DHCP services.
The availability of software on the server was limited (i remember backup services, licensing software). But for central file service and printing it was rock solid, even in a bit larger (for the time, around 1995) environments without any issues. (IRC >200 clients on a single 486 CPU and 4 MB RAM)
For a year or two there, the only other commercial Unix workstation not made by Sun could be had from Radio Shack: the TRS-80 Model 16 running Xenix. Enough small businesses ran Xenix, with up to 3 simultaneous users on a single stock machine (console + 2 terminals) that Radio Shack kept supporting these things until the late 1980s; with up to an 8 MHz CPU, up to 7 MiB of RAM, and an actual (external) MMU, the Model 16 could handle more workload, theoretically more stably than an x86 machine running Xenix until about the time Xenix/386 came out.
Later entrants like SGI targeted their workstations at media creatives (helpfully, Apple were in crisis by this time so A/UX wasnt remotely a problem). IBM and DEC just produced me-too workstations but there was nothing special about AIX or Ultrix unless you were already a customer.
The UNIX wars of the 90s were basically the UNIX vendors trying to take over the whole market and not just their classic turf.
It was so expensive, that we shared a PC tower with the whole class.
Not timesharing, rather we would prepare our C applications on MS-DOS 3.3 with Turbo C 2.0, using with mocks for UNIX APIs, and then take turns of 15 minutes per group, trying to make it work on the Xenix tower.
That's not really correct.
I mean, yes, it was rock solid, true.
But it was not a file server, or even a file and print server. It wasn't a "server" as such at all (although it could be one if you wanted.)
A "server" is a concept from client/server computing:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/computer-science/client...
In other words you have a network, with lots of small computers (clients) talking to one or more big computers (servers).
That is so pervasive since the 1990s that you seem to assume it's how everything worked. It is not. Xenix was strong in the earlier era of host based computing.
The core concept is that you only have 1 computer, the host. It's kept in a special server room somewhere and carefully managed. On users' desks they have just terminals, which are not computers. They are just screens and keyboards, with no "brains". Keystrokes go over the wire to the host, and the host sends back text that the terminal displays.
No network, no computers in front of users.
In the '70s and early '80s this was the dominant model because computers were so expensive. Before microprocessors host machines cost tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of $/£ and companies could only afford 1 of them.
Most were proprietary: proprietary processors running proprietary OSes with proprietary apps in proprietary languages.
Some companies adapted this in the microprocessor era. For instance Alpha Micro sold 680x0 hosts running a clone of a DEC PDP OS called AMOS: Alpha Micro OS. It sold its own terminals etc. It was cheaper and it used VHS videocassettes as removable media, instead of disks.
Unix replaced a lot of this: proprietary versions of the same basic OS, on those proprietary processors, but with open standards languages, open standard terminals, etc.
Xenix was the dominant Unix for x86 hosts. It let you turn an 80386 (or at a push a 286) PC into a host for a fleet of dumb terminals.
Xenix as stock came with no networking, no C compiler, no X11, no graphics, no GUI, nothing. Each box was standalone and completely isolated.
But a 386 with 4MB of RAM could control 10 or 20 terminals and provide computing to a whole small business.
No Ethernet, no TCP/IP, no client/server stuff.
Client server is what killed Xenix's market. When PCs became so cheap that you could replace a sub-$1000 terminal with a sub-$1000 PC, which was way more flexible and capable, then Xenix boxes with dumb terminals were ripped out and replaced with a PC on every desk.
Opposite of what you write the linked page starts with
"In a client-server system, a large number of personal computers communicate with shared servers on a local area network" and later explicitly lists continues with references to Microsoft (N)OS. And then the refecence from NOS leeds us to "There are only a few popular choices – Novell, UNIX, Linux, and Windows. The complexity of NOS forces a simple overview of the features and benefits."
So I don't really understand what you point that Netware neither was a file-- nor a print-server.
Netware 1/2/3 was nothing but a file and print server, and Netware >=4 was a notably poor app server.
Just as some trivia, Novell bought UNIX System V R4 from AT&T and planned to merge it with Netware to create "SuperNOS", which would have been a direct competitor to NT. But they never got it out the door and spun-off UNIX to (old) SCO.
Netware 3.x did.
Netware 4.x let you demote NLMs into ring 1/2/3 for slightly greater stability.
See: http://dune.pol.lublin.pl/pub/pc/novell/NetWare/ch07/ch07.ht...
Look for the section "Using New NLMs in NetWare 4.x"
NetWare was TempleOS with networking...
2. See my earlier comment: it's only true for 3.x and not for >=4.x.
I used the stand alone version, not the later NLM on the server
I remember the first release of NetWare 386 very well; it was a breeze to install, but the early version had a bug and if you unplugged the 10Base2 coax from the server it would crash. Apparently, the routine to display a warning message on the console had an issue. Novell issued a patch NLM.
I had one site that experienced random crashes, but it was not the aforementioned bug. Long story short: After about two months of sleuthing, working with Novell and Compaq, camping on site and driving to/from the office to site (about 2hr each way), I found that it was a mains spike caused by a dishwasher right up against the server room wall in the next room.
The fix was to move the Compaq server, which was actually a large desktop model, on its table to the opposite end of the server room.
At the time I think we had one Sun E450, and 20-30 random desktop hosts. All headless, except for keyboards connected. We also had a bunch of phone lines and external modems, which were used to run UUCP jobs overnight, or transfer files other ways, to remote SCO Unixware hosts.
It was only later that I worked with "proper" servers, with niceties such as remote access, redundant power-supplies, and maybe even multiple hard drives (!)
Also normal for the 1980s and early 1990s.
Because PCs were not servers, and servers were not PCs, and almost nobody made or offered server-class hardware built around x86.
The first I ever saw was a Compaq SystemPro and those things cost as much as a decent new car.
Wikipedia says it was the first ever PC-compatible server!
"Unix" though, right?
Imho the entire LAN culture of the 90's was enabled by being able to join in for the cost of a coffee and people would often have a few spare cards for those that showed up to the party without one.
However, by the mid 1990s it was clear that Windows NT and the TCP/IP protocol of the Internet would soon make Novell and NetWare fade into the sunset.
I think Windows 95 and "intranetware 4" came in either summer 96 or summer 97. By 98 or 99 we had some ISDN internet connectivity, I assume via a proxy running on the netware server. Internet access was still ISDN based when I left in summer 2000.
Then, I saw the UX. You had to configure IP addresses as dotted HEX quads. It was pretty obvious that someone at Novell fundamentally didn’t get it.
I also recall having to key-in hard drive defect tables as part of the install.
No. You have the timing about right but not the version number.
Netware 4 was still based around IPX/SPX; the big new feature was a network-wide directory server, called NDS, for distributed authentication.
IntraNetware was specifically NetWare 4.11, with improved TCP/IP integration, an Internet-standards email server, and a web server so it could host LAN-internal intranet websites.
https://www.novell.com/news/press/archive/1996/08/pr96151.ht...
> Netwars was a key component of this.
Was that a typo for "Netware"? Netwars was a different thing: a game that ran on Netware networks.
The webserver was a key thing in later years too -- as you could put an <img src='c:/con/con'> on the homepage, immense fun.
And now look at the broken mess of Google today...
The company was a PC builder that wanted to get into software, but they also did some services work like installing Netware. They were a fairly sizable local operation until one day when they won a large bid for computers for the local University by bidding based on a projected continuing drop in components, and then an unexpected supply problem pushed prices significantly up. This was after I left the company, but they seemed to go bankrupt basically overnight.
After you got it working right, NetWare was rock-solid. Though if you weren't seriously experienced with NetWare, the "got it working right" could be difficult to distinguish from "went through Hell".
But once MS's OS's grew up enough to cope with running a serious fileserver, NetWare was doomed. Didn't matter that MS OS's were pretty mediocre. Their business strategy was good and ruthless, they had vastly more money, NetWare was a lone-niche product, and Novell wasn't very good at either business strategy, nor bigger-picture technical management.
Netware's disk/file benchmarks were around 3000% faster than all others. The mag had to print a disclaimer on the disk benchmark graph, saying it wasn't a misprint or anything, but that Netware's score was so high the bars for all the others had disappeared.
It loaded FATs into RAM as it booted and they stayed there. (This is why a UPS was so important.) Its disk indexing speeds were from RAM. SSDs speeds, 25 years before mass-market SSDs were available.
Only its near-bulletproof stability made this viable, but it was.
Clarification: disk caching in RAM was rare back then because RAM was so expensive... and NetWare needed a lot of RAM, with the amount scaling linearly according to disk size.
DEC VMS didn't have any kind of disk cache, for instance. It was an expensive 3rd party optional extra.
Soon after as CPUs got a bit faster it went the other way: on-the-fly compression of disk, via tools like Stacker, because not only was RAM very expensive, so was disk space.
I worked for a Fortune 200 corporation the rolled out Banyan VINES in the late 1980s. FYI, it was Unix underneath, worked great as far as I recall.
https://wiki.restless.systems/wiki/Banyan_VINES_resurrection
http://banyan-vines.bamertal.com/
This has a history but it gets its facts wrong -- e.g. 7.0 wasn't the last version, it got to v8.5.
https://thehistoryofcomputing.net/banyan-vines-and-the-emerg...
VINES's killer features were that the XNS network protocol allowed a network to be divided up into a network of networks, with routing between nodes. (You couldn't do that on the Microsoft/3Com NetBEUI protocol.) And it had an early network directory, called StreetTalk, with a three level address space:
user@group@organisation
Most rivals either had user@organisation as the only naming system -- including the Internet itself of course -- or you had to name the specific server:
alice@bob.charlie.com
That is what Novell NDS in Netware 4 was designed to replicate, in a more scalable fashion. Netware 4 was Novell's attempt to catch up with Banyan's StreeTalk.
It was also arguably the most advanced server on the Intel platform.
There was a moment in time when it looked like Novell might become THE corporate back end server technology and all sorts of servers were built to run on Netware. I think there was Oracle and Lotus Notes and CC Mail and some others
However, Novell for whatever reason simply didn't make Netware robust. Netware needed to be memory protected and have task preemption and it did neither, making it unsuitable as a server. Why they refused to do this is unclear. I seem to recall reading that Drew Major didn't have the technical chops to make it happen. I also recall reading that Drew Major believed that task preemption and memory protection were slow, and that speed was more important.
Also, Netware was late to the party with TCP/IP support - they were all in on IPX/SPX and in the end TCP won the entire protocol game, sending IPX/SPX, XNS and other common network protocols to the dustbin.
Anyhow Microsoft came along with Windows NT and OS/2 and stomped on Novell and since Netware wasn't up to the job, the show was over.
[0] http://www.novell.com/documentation/ncl_sle_11/login/data/h5...
You can see it here: https://youtu.be/G2Jk-tMz-eU
These instructions for loading NetWare in KVM would probably be helpful: https://www.zx.net.nz/netware/server/411-kvm-2/
It has been implemented for Windows: http://www.anderbergfamily.net/ant/perfsnake/
There is also this re-implementation for Linux: https://github.com/cosimo/xscreensaver-loadsnake
This led directly to the engineers' slogan:
"Strategic" means "you don't make any money"
However an expensive niche fileserver OS—which made a lot of sense in the 80s—was simply not needed any longer as hardware, storage, and OS commoditization happened over the next twenty years. Moore’s law was not kind to it.
Novell got hit in the head by NT and the internet, and below the belt by Linux, and went down for the count. Was sad the day I removed it from my resume.
In those days "marketing" meant uploading the executable to Simtel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simtel) and they would "announce" it. Getting those random checks in the mail from some company or college I never heard of was pretty cool.
Anyway, since the desktops were pretty tightly controlled, we ended up storing a copy of Unreal Tournament 99 out on the school's file share. It was buried several directories deep with some innocuous filename to help prevent detection.
Each day before class started, a group of us would login, download the UT99 files, and drop into a LAN game. We had basic Dell Dimension systems but they were more than adequate for the game, so we'd frag it out every day for 10-20 minutes before class.
I was also a systems and networking installer.
Some training companies insisted that their trainers were 'Novell Certified' - and indeed I was, because to purchase, install and get support directly from Novell, your organisation (in my case, my own company with me as sole employee) you had to have one person qualified as a Certified Netware Salesperson (I think that's what they called it), so I paid for and passed that exam. I never bothered with CNA, CNE or ECNE, although I did write official material for them.
That reminds me - I also wrote some of the original CompTIA A+ Service Technician training material, and ended up delivering it and running train the trainer courses around the world.
Again, one company asked me whether I was A+ Service Technician certified, and I said I wasn't, so to deliver training for them, I registered, popped into their exam room and took the cert during a morning break in training. Happy to say I passed - helped somewhat by the fact that I wrote some of the exam questions!
Apparently there are all kinds of goodies in that dump, like previously unknown betas of MS-DOS and OS/2, but there are no links to the dump itself. It's a shame that the community is so secretive about this :(
These are _very large_, multi-MB zip files, indexing I think north of at least 100GB worth of files.
The kock.exe turned every account into administrators. Guess who was caught using it in secondary school :)