MCNE/MCSE here from the mid-90’s, agree it was obvious that Netware would likely fade. Windows NT 3.51 (even though it wasn’t as good at the time), was more user friendly and had the Windows interface, compatibility, etc etc
However, it NT wasn’t remotely as stable as Netware at that time either.
Then we got to watch as Novell slowly went insane competing and buying WordPerfect and doing all sorts of other crazy moves.
I still wish that Novell had taken all of its money and bought VMware when they were just working on GSX/ESX (now vSphere). This would have changed the trajectory of both Novell and the market.
Besides the technical and functional weaknesses of NetWare, Novell also shot themselves in the foot by making the product hard to buy. As an end customer you generally couldn't buy it directly. Instead you had to go through an authorized reseller who would try to upsell you on a bunch of hardware and services. That made some sense in the early days of PC LANs when you had to plug hardware jumpers into network cards to configure interrupts but by the time Windows NT launched it was just stupid. Microsoft made NT easy and hassle free for anyone with money to buy and install, which tremendously accelerated early adoption.
The advantage of Microsoft being second is that they could watch what VARs were installing and make very sure that NT would work seamlessly with that. It didnt take much for them to realize that, say, the 3Com 3C905 or the NE2000 NIC were far and away the best selling NIC in Netware installations, and that therefore they should make very sure that they Just Worked on NT.
I worked in Token Ring at the time. It was...less fun.
NT 3.51 was rock solid, I had it on my desk and it never crashed once during the ~year I ran it. Which was a huge deal for MS in those days. Of course they chose performance over stability in 4.x moving display drivers in to the kernel. Thankfully it didn’t affect servers much since they could be run on vga/svga drivers.
i ran NT4 from right before 98 until about a year into win2k's release cycle. I remember it never crashing, i think power outages were the only thing that ruined my uptime during those years. I had XP for a little while after win2k because of directx, but as soon as x64 released i was on that, and then 7 x64. My timeline for windows left me moderately happy with my own experience - but i did a lot of "repair" for 95-vista for friends, family, customers, and businesses.
Stability was heavily dependent on your display card and driver >= 4.0 until the recent past. It could be fine or horrible depending on how well the manufacturer did their job.
My memory is that 3.X could restart graphics if a crash happened there.
In addition, from what I vaguely recall, one of the big selling point of NT LAN Manager was the ability to deploy network server applications on the server.
Novell responded with Netware Loadable Modules, but they weren’t as versatile and needed specialised knowledge/tools.
Yep, Netware ran entirely in Ring 0. In linux terminology it was a kernel with no user space, and NLMs were kernel modules. Very fast for file serving, but any application could crash the system. Stability was largely a result of lots of updates. NT had userspace, protected memory, etc, and a GUI for setting up TCP/IP.
Netware existed and thrived before NT LAN Manager. NT LAN Manager seemed like the one MS product that couldn't make inroads against established competition. It simply wasn't as good as Netware.
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.
LAN Manager is a whole family of programs. Don't confused LanMan the family with the one implementation in NT -- LanMan is quite a bit older than WinNT.
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.
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.
> NT had userspace, protected memory, etc, and a GUI for setting up TCP/IP.
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.
Microsoft Xenix (never knew more about it than the name).
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)
> Microsoft Xenix (never knew more about it than the name).
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.
Apollo made competitive workstations at the time until they got swallowed by HP. The Unix workstation market was bigger than Sun, but since they were the most successful nobody remembers how competitive that segment was. The model 16 was a footnote not a competitor
Apollo's Domain/OS (formerly AEGIS) was impressive, but did not gain a full POSIX layer until later in the 80s, as I understand it. So the Model 16 really was the only other commercial Unix workstation, besides Suns, in early 1983. This advantage wouldn't last long; by 1984 other Unix desktops like the HP Integral had emerged.
I believe Apollo had a proprietary OS with limited Unix compatibility. So maybe the grandparent poster is right about the Model 16 being the only other non-Sun desktop Unix for a while, as long as you define Unix tightly enough.
Sun gets the crown because prior to the sun/1 there wasnt really any such thing as a UNIX workstation. You had a terminal connected into a host running UNIX (or VMS) and that was that. My pet theory is that Sun succeeded against Apollo because Sun decided to sell to Wall St quants for their day job number crunching whereas Apollo (and later HPE) sold to engineers doing simulations and CAD. Naturally the quants told their colleagues and the stock went brrr.
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.
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.
Not even the articles from the webpage you've linked talks about "...big computers (servers) [...] with dumb terminals" nor that the concept of client/server is
> The core concept is that you only have 1 computer, the host. [...] On users' desks they have just terminals, which are not computers
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.
The issue with UNIX on PCs was the $1000 or whatever licensing cost.
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.
Around 2006/2007, I was playing around with NetWare 6.5 at work. We had heaps of it but lots of talk about replacing NetWare/eDir/GroupWise with Windows/AD/Exchange (which I think finally did happen after I left the place). My recollection was it was quite unstable - because, having come from Linux, I was playing with bash and SSH. bash would crash a lot (something that very rarely happens on Linux) but it wouldn’t bring down the whole server (which was a dev/test NetWare server anyway). I don’t remember what exactly I was trying to do: I had some work-related justification, which I forget now - something something identity management - but my real reason was just to explore the system. The instability of it convinced me to not take any ideas I had any further.
The software I was working on in the late '80s made use of Btrieve, a ISAM database server running on Netware. IIRC there was also a SQL server of some sort that we used with it, mostly for reporting.
I was a systems engineer and also taught NetWare admin classes. I also worked with Novell to update their training material.
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.
I remember working in random IT companies, back in the early nineties, where our "servers" were a collection of random desktop machines running Linux.
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 (!)
Ugh. I hate "bugs" like that. I worked in PC repair while at college. I remember one customer with a mouse where the right-button wouldn't work. I replaced the mouse, RAM, HDD + OS, mobo + CPU before I tried another PSU. Literally everything worked perfectly except that mouse button.
A big cultural outcome of Netware was the shear volume of highly compatible Novell network cards that flooded the market. Novell charged a fortune for Netware licenses but their hardware was cheap. Especially when corporations upgraded and there was suddenly 1000 NE2000 cards for $2 each at the local swap meet.
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.
NetWare proliferated very rapidly during the late 80s and was common on most networks I used into the mid 1990s. Their file server product was stable and easy to configure, and worked very well with nearly every client out there using the fast IPX/SPX protocol.
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.
Netware 4 I think was dubbed "intranetware" and had some form of IP support. We had netware at school in about 93-96 with windows 3.1 running on diskless clients. Netwars was a key component of this.
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.
I don't remember that. I do remember that with 2.12 and 2.15 I occasionally had to use a hex editor on disk drive-related files to make the drives work with certain hardware.
I also recall having to key-in hard drive defect tables as part of the install.
> Netware 4 I think was dubbed "intranetware" and had some form of IP support.
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.
No it wasn't a typo. Netwars was the most important part of the provision we had at school as it kept us sane in the "this term we're going to write a letter" lessons.
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.
Reading this I was amazed that the cheapskate place I worked ~89-92 shelled out to get us a Netware server, considering the crappy hardware they had us developers working on. But then I just realized that we were probably running on a pirated copy.
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.
It was insanely common for those PC builders to be fly by night operations steeped in pirating everything they could get a hold of. It wasn't hard for some random people with a little bit of computer skill to get into it.
Ah, NetWare! Those were the days...though my memories are mostly of the prior (286) version.
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.
I saw a benchmark in a US PC magazine once, around this time, benchmarking and comparing NOSs: OS/2 1.3 Server with 3+Open, Banyan VINES, MS LanManager on OS/2, and so on.
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.
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.
Hard to grasp now but Netware was really exciting technology at the time.
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.
Two Netware memories: FIRE PHASERS[0] and the screen saver on the server that showed processor load as a "snake" (and one snake per processor) with length relative to load.
That's pretty amazing. Do you recall which version of Netware had the snakes? Did it need to be enabled through config? I'd love to try it out in a VM or 86Box.
Netware was awesome and I remember it fondly. Was quite productive to use and admin.
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 the shareware days I made pretty good money for a college student with a graphical Netware login utility called "vgalogin" (great name I know). It put the graphics card in VGA mode and integrated a screensaver and quote of the day along with a login dialog. Its main use was simplifying login batch files since with it you didn't need to detect a bad login in the batch file.
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.
My experiences with NetWare came about 2 decades after most in this thread, but thought it would be fun to share anyway. My high school used some version of NetWare for all of the XP-based machines the students could access. I specifically recall having login form with a red Novell banner across the top.
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 a freelance trainer and specialised in NetWare and networking at the time. I was very busy (UK) working for the likes of Barefoot computer training (Aris), Skytech, Azlan, Comtec, Expertise, QA and others.
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!
I installed a 1000 node netware 386 network for GE in Schenectady at the time. It worked very well, what killed netware was NT had no per seat licenses initially, it was priced per server, unlimited users. Most of my customers only used file/print services. Nobody paid for netware after that. After Novell was fatally weakened, Microsoft introduced per seat licensing, then started aggressively auditing compliance.
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 :(
Someone got access to the full tape backups for two warez BBSes (The WaREZ HouZE and Piper's Pit) and uploaded the tape images to archive.org: https://archive.org/details/ibm-wgam-wbiz-collection. The collection spans the late 1980s to the late 1990s.
Better icons back then than today's software. I remember one that looked like an overhead view of a gecko. I remember around that time UUNet went public.
Our university's computers were all connected by Novell NetWare around the late nineties.
I browsed the network folders one day and crept into the depths of the mechanical engineering's masters department, very curious to see what they're working on.
Everything was password-protected, though. So, I tried the obvious trick of using the folder name as the password.
One of them works: ertjie ("pea" in Afrikaans - this was Rand Afrikaans Universiteit, btw, now called University of Johannesburg)
I gain access, and look at some awesome blueprints for what looked like a dune buggy, etc etc. Then I spot something which makes my heart rate increase ever so slightly: QUAKE2.EXE
I right click and create a networked link to the EXE and share it with the entire class (30-ish second-years taking "C++ for engineers").
Most of us run the game, and find an ongoing LAN game and join it. All of a sudden, 5 or so masters students are joined by 20+ more folks and having a blast.
And "ertjie" popping up on in-game chat asking something like "wtf did you guys come from lol"
