> The NetWare operating system installed on the server computer acts as a traffic cop, masterminding the flow of information over a network. (The latest version costs $4,695 for 25 users, $47,995 for 1,000.)
I’m not convinced that was much of a reason. Windows NT 4 Server pricing was similar, with licenses needed for each client connecting, plus additional licensing for the OS running on those clients.
I was deploying a lot of small office networks in the late 90s. I found NT 3.51 and 4.0 a ton easier to purchase for Customers (i.e. the company I worked for needed a much looser “partnership” arrangement with Microsoft vs. Novell).
NT was definitely cheaper, too. That made a difference in small deployments where I was often getting nickel-and-dimed.
I think licensing was a huge factor in Microsoft winning.
Microsoft's license was soft, and depending on the customer buying enough paper to cover, if you could even find a reseller that could describe how to properly license Windows Server (exteremely doubtful).
OOTH, Novell's licensing was a hard limit. Once that # of workstations logged in, those without a license were hosed.
On all the jobs I did in those days, Novell networks at each customer site _never_ had enough licenses to cover every workstation. There was always somebody left out and they had to go bug people to see if they were done with the network so they could get in their tasks. Nobody ever seemed to overprovision their licenses to cover every single workstation (or even to have extra).
I never met a company using Microsoft server that properly had their CALs licensed, and they didn't want to hear it from me. Finding somebody to sell you the proper CALs was an interesting exercise.
Most other network server OSes at the time (the Unix vendors were trying hard in this space in those early days too) also had hard licenses. Which was part of why they didn't gain traction at all.
They got serious about license activation in the Windows Vista - Windows 7 era, but now they're back to where anyone can install a Windows license of their choice with just a few commands, using a pirate KMS server.
The cynical take on this is that Microsoft has pivoted hard into being a services and advertising company, so it is more important to them that you run Windows with all of its data gathering and advertising and cloud BS then it is that you paid for Windows at all.
They could easily break the fake KMS but choose not to. It speaks a lot to their priorities.
That's what I figured as well. To Microsoft right now, more devices running windows = more data gathered, regardless of whether the device was activated by a pirated KMS server or not.
LTSB/LTSC doesn't have the anything like the levels of telemetry in the Home SKUs, but even so, as a (former) MSFT SE I can give you my personal assurances that the telemtry is about seeing how the product is used and not for marketing/money-making reasons (beyond, ostensibly, making the product better to entice people to pay for upgrades or subscription services).
Thanks for the info, that squashes that theory then. I guess its more of a case of just not being work it for Microsoft to go after the very small fraction of non-business users who pirate windows.
It's like that whole thing about putting heat sensors under everyone's desk "to optimize HVAC usage". That may be the stated and initial reason, but once the heat sensors are there you'd be a damn fool not to use them for absentee disciplinary purposes.
Microsoft can tell us all they want that the telemetry is just for product usage. When the first slow quarter comes around they're going to gaze longingly at that huge treasure trove of data they have and start asking themselves if selling it won't help them meet their quarterly projections.
The server / client access license side, other than Remote Desktop / Terminal Services (which I assume is because of licensing with third-party developed code) has trended “softer” over the years.
“It’s easier for our software to compete with Linux when there’s piracy than when there’s not… You can get the real thing, and you get the same price.”
This is roughly my recollection as well. Along with another comment above about lack of apps for Novell.
Every small business was going to be running Windows already, so an NT server was kind of a logical conclusion. Couple that with the fact that the NT server was likely cheaper to license (even if it was ultimately not properly licensed), and that the NT server at least offered the appearance of being more flexible and capable than a Novell server, and it made sense that NetWare died off.
As a reseller, I also seem to recall needing to have a bunch of techs certified on all the various Novell apps to get a good discount. I remember going for my Groupwise certification specifically so our company could get a better discount level from Novell to try and be more competitive. I think I only ever installed one GroupWise deployment.
The pricing quote is from 1993 when Windows NT 3.1 was released. A Windows NT 3.1 server license cost $1500 and didn't require client access licensing. Many of my clients jumped ship from Netware because of the huge price difference. Almost all of them were pissed when NT 3.5 was released and required client access licensing but having just finished migrating off Netware they weren't going to migrate back.
Even today when I hear "Network Operating System" I cannot grok what on earth it is supposed to mean. Back in the day when I was trying to understand how to setup these horrors, I remember thinking I was missing something that would magically "work on the network" (at some lower OSI level) not "a server that sent things over the network"
If we are talking confusions that killed netware, my money is on marketing "network operating system" as opposed to "buy microsoft NT on your server to run your network"
Well, Sun did it under 'the network is the computer' so they weren't exactly alone in that. And that story didn't quite have a happy ending either. It think the single biggest factors was the Microsoft was so dominant on the desktop that they had a really strong advantage to beat Novell at their own game with NT as a server operating system. That made it 'single source supplier' which is worth gold to any IT director that doesn't want to get caught in the middle between two parties pointing at each other when things don't work.
There is another comment here basically saying "Microsoft was on a serious roll and nothing stood up to them". It's probably the best explanation when so many factors might explain different facets, if you aggregate everything then in the end the favourite to win is the one to bet on.
That's exactly it. It was confusing to me as well, still is. Netware basically provided networking and login services - something that Windows NT basically threw in as a "feature" on top of it being a general purpose OS.
Netware's demise was a matter of time. I am reading other comments here stating that it was the lack of preemptive multitasking that doomed it. Not even close. Netware was a feature mascarading as an OS.
No. It was Ray Noorda's obsession with beating Microsoft and diversifying their focus that was the root cause , in my opinion. However, it was also Ray that led Novell to its glorious heights.
Eric Schmidt ultimately failed to revitalize them in spite of best efforts. But Noorda and Bob Frankenberg have to share at least some of the blame as well--as does a whole lot of internal politics. Novell basically managed to go essentially nowhere through the 1990s while Windows NT was maturing.
I don't know. I really don't like Schmidt, I think he's one of the biggest hypocrites alive but Novell was arguably already on the way out when he took over.
Noorda made it go up, and he saw the beginnings of it going back down and that's when Schmidt was hired, probably in an attempt to turn the tide and avoid the inevitable victory of Microsoft over Novell. But Microsoft really had an unfair advantage and personally I do not think Novell ever had a realistic chance of staying in the race in the longer term.
Because he said that we should all just get used to not having privacy any more but when a publication listed the things they found out about Schmidt he said that it should have never been printed.
I thought then and still say that had Novell ported IPX/SPX to Unix[0] (they did own Unix in the 90s), Microsoft would never have been able to make them irrelevant.
Because the biggest reason Netware lost was the inability to develop software on the platform.
This severely limited the value of Netware as a server operating system, as developers (for the most part) prefer to develop on the the platform (cross-compiling for other flavors of *nix doesn't count) for which they're developing software.
What's more, IIUC, the development tools for Netware were just awful. Which additionally limited the number of developers working on Netware-related applications.
And even those few folks mostly abandoned it as NT gained popularity as a server and a development platform. Had there been a robust user/development environment (like Unix), that likely wouldn't have happened.
[0] I am aware that Netware was mostly written in x86 assembler, but porting IPX/SPX and a few other bits and bobs would have allowed Novell to migrate to a Unix platform without having to rewrite the entire OS.
>What would be the benefit of porting IPX/SPX to Unix? Netware already ran on TCP/IP.
Uhh...The millions of clients who didn't have IP stacks?
I'd note that Novell didn't include an IP stack in Netware until 1996[0]. By then they'd already lost to Microsoft.
And they'd purchased Unix more than three years earlier, but didn't port Netware to Unix at all. Rather it was Netware on Linux, and wasn't released until 2005 -- when Netware was already irrelevant.
Had they migrated to Unix in the 1993-1994 time frame they would have eaten Microsoft's lunch. But they didn't. And so they lost. And they are gone.
If I remember well this is the story that repeats every time with Microsoft: Novell was the king in the initial phase of networking in companies then Microsoft included the functionality in a modern operating system, network growths, and their sales force was greater than Novell one. Corollary: Microsoft sells s**t such as Teams. We are too biased to technology that forgot the power of strong businesses.
Novell wouldn’t, or couldn’t, make Netware use task preemption and memory protection.
It’s a startling deficiency that killed its chances of becoming a general purpose server.
Without these things, the Netware server couldn’t be trusted to run independent applications.
There were some third party server applications built for Netware, I think maybe CC:mail server and Lotus Notes, but the memory protection and cooperative multitasking meant they didn’t last long.
I don’t know if this is true but I heard it was Drew Major who made this call, which IMO killed Netware.
The justification I heard at the time was that memory protection was too slow. Better slow than dead. I think Novell just didn’t have the technical chops to do it.
Also Microsoft was at the height of its powers as a competition killing machine and nothing that stood in its way survived. It really genuinely looked back then like Microsoft was going to wipe out everything and it would be a Microsoft only future. Novell was no exception along with Lotus and Borland and many others.
Probably compatibility? Protected memory and pre-emptive multitasking were a notoriously difficult transition. Apple never managed it with classic macOS, and scars from the transition are visible all over the Windows API even decades later.
I can see why Apple couldn't do it, the MMU on the Mac wasn't up to the task but on the PC anything post 386 was more than up for it from a technical perspective. Even the 286 machines could do it very well (QnX was originally built on a 16 bit platform).
Even the awkward segmentation on 8086 was arguably a form of memory protection. Minix on 8086 was surprisingly robust in practice (obviously not in theory) as a rogue 'near' pointer would usually only corrupt the current program.
But on the original topic, yes once you've got a 286+ there's no excuse for your OS not having true memory protection.
That only really happened from the 68030 onward didn't it? Until the 030 processes needed to be pretty careful not to step on each others address space.
Hm, ok, I wasn't aware that the 020's already had a full MMU on board, thanks for the correction. Probably they made too many assumptions about being able to mess around in other processes address space to enable it by the time they got it.
I think they are incorrect. The original Mac II (68020 machine) didn't ship with a full MMU. It had a socket for the 68851 though, if one wanted to add one. I somehow doubt many people did.
The newer Mac II's (IIx onward) were 68030-based, so they would've had MMUs built in. (They also released the Mac LC later on, which was 68020 based and had no socket for an MMU.)
As far as I know, it was ignored until System 7, which added virtual memory support. A/UX (Apple Unix) required it, but that wasn't released until a year or so after the Mac II was initially available.
God I remember those days. The Mac was way late to the party.
Was Win95 preemptive or cooperative? I totally forget. Pretty sure only the NT versions of windows were preemptive.
I recall there was a period of time when you’d run Windows 2000 because it was so much more stable than 98/ME. It worked mostly okay but it didn’t have as good of support for gaming and was pretty late to the party with DirectX support.
Win95 was preemptive and with full memory protection.
They obviously had to make compromises for performance and compatibility’s sake that made the long term move to NT essential, but I feel like the Chicago kernel team’s efforts have never (to my knowledge) been well-documented or -appreciated.
I wouldn't say full memory protection. The shared arena was kind of a "don't touch but the hardware isn't enforcing it" shared 1GB region that all processes had access to.
Win95 was both, it didn't preempt Win12 apps, they'd all run in the same VM space, but 32bit ones could be preempted, but still take down the system. Full protetion eeded the NT kernel.
The topic is briefly touched on in the book: "In search of stupidity". Basically the NetWare kernel wasn't actually developed by Novell, at least not initially, but by a team from a company called Superset. As described you could suggest things to the Superset team, but they wasn't actually someone your could order around, partly because they weren't even employees for many years. This team completely ignore customer demands, and focuses solely on technical improvement that have little real-world tie-in.
The book is "In Search of stupidity" by Merrill R. Chapman, this particular topic is covered on page 173-174.
There were some exceptions like Sun but the vast majority of the technology industry absolutely saw Wintel as inevitable whether they liked the idea or not. You may think they were wrong--and they were to a large degree--but it was absolutely the prevailing sentiment at the time.
with all due respect, please re-think your words.. There are millions of active minds, thousands of companies, multiple world markets.. and you reduce the entire globe to "it was thought to be inevitable" ?! do I have to point out the reductio ad absurdum element to that statement? I was there, others here too..
In party conversation parlance, I think the sentiment was common. Microsoft was actually subject to a monopoly decree, they invested in Apple to prop up a competitor, they were eating the lunch of workstations, and we were years away from the "Year of the Linux Desktop". Probably many HNers were part of the other side -- running the workstations, installing Linux, excited about Netscape, but Microsoft felt like a Goliath. That they were eventually humbled, now we live with many Goliaths.
It might have been the prevailing sentiment... of all the Microsoft-subsidized trade rags. I just keep thinking how differently "computing" might have evolved in the mid-to-late 90's if other companies had gotten into a spending war with Microsoft for favorable coverage in the press. It's a tradition that Gates continues to this day with his foundation, and which others seem still yet to learn.
It really didn't have much to do with ad spending. There were a bunch of Unix-oriented trade rags as well.
There was mostly a lot of appetite from both buyers and application vendors to standardize at the operating system level--which Unix in the mid-90s decidedly was not. There was an effort to come up with a multi-vendor Unix, which SCO predictably screwed up in their pre-lawsuit guise. Linux would eventually mature sufficiently and gain business support for this role on servers but that didn't really happen in a major way until the 2000s, accelerated by IBM's endorsement.
Unix looked very much to be on the ropes at the time. It was extremely fragmented and warring with itself. There was no Linux to unify the Unix-like operating systems. Unix was fraught with lawsuits and licensing claims and issues.
I worked in the heart of the corporate world and at this time the sentiment has changed from "you can't get fired buying IBM" to "you can't get fired buying Microsoft".
As @gaff said in this thread said - it has nothing to do with Microsoft ad spend or what the magazines said - it was dead obvious. And were it not for Linux then it would have been a Microsoft world. Remember also it was Microsoft that saved Apple from bankruptcy when jobs returned. I do think that if not Linux then FreePSD would likely have become todays "Linux".
I did a podcast series on "Was open source inevitable?" a couple years back which ended up more focused on infrastructure and Linux than it probably should have been. [0] But the general conclusion of my guests was that it probably was. (And, yes, some variant of BSD in spite of the legal hangover. Bryan Cantrill argues this specifically.) I do think that absent an open source movement beyond the fringe, Microsoft might have ended up more dominant commercially.
This is the wrong take. Instead it's the typical low end overtakes the high end that we've seen over and over.
MSDOS on the PC was clearly not suitable for real business apps. Well not for networked ones. Well not for ones that need a server. Well not for GUI apps. Well not for apps that needed more powerful CPUs than those you x86 chips.
Wait.. why are all our customers on Windows NT on Pentiums?
Hard to see how having Novell, Sun Microsystems, HP, IBM, DEC, etc. dipping their hands into our pocketbooks would be any better than Microsoft. None of them would have behaved any better than Microsoft either if they'd been dominant.
I was running a 2.x server. it was a sad day that I had to reboot and break the 359 day uptime... Amazing system, solid as a rock as long as long as you stuck to file sharing and printer management.
Lack of memory protection and pre-emptive multitasking allowed for faster performance of NetWare's core file and printer sharing services. Everything ran close to the metal with minimal OS overhead and few context switches. That was a major selling point back when computers were orders of magnitude slower. But by the time Windows NT launched, even though the file sharing was slower than NetWare it was still good enough for most customers.
One of the major SQL database vendors (maybe Sybase?) actually ported their product to NetWare. But no one bought it due to the problems you stated.
The NetWare development tools were also terrible. Whereas the early Windows NT development tools were actually pretty good. Unlike with NetWare, NT allowed developers to code on a workstation platform and then deploy on a server platform with an identical API which was a huge factor in getting third-party developers onboard.
Yeah, I made some use of SPX/IPX. Talk about a minefield! System data in user space, if your program crashed just ctrl-alt-del (this was back in the DOS era) because the instant that data block got overwritten the system would crash anyway.
On the other hand why hasn't anyone implemented a recycle bin like they did? (Your whole drive was your recycle bin.) And the users really loved the feature that said "this drawing is locked by <station name>" that I can see no way to implement under any other system.
I started on Netware 2.x but mostly worked with Netware 3.1x.
There was a guy at our office that was extremely proficient with Netware, so much so that if he got physical access to a Netware server, he could press the special 'Admin key sequence' (from memory it was about 4 keys pressed at once on the keyboard) and then he would issue commands to peek into memory and tell you the Admin password. This trick only worked if you had already unlocked the screen console with the Admin account since the server booted, but it showed us very early on how important physical security to even a keyboard was.
I do remember a key fight that happened back then with Netware and Microsoft was how Netware gave you a free 2 user license to a server if that server was only running network services, such as maybe a DHCP server. If you wanted to do file sharing, then you had to buy the appropriate user license.
Microsoft introduced the ability for a Windows NT server to mount a share locally where the contents of that share was data from a Netware server. This way you could get a free 2 user Netware server license, have the NT server use one of those licenses, and then hundreds of people could access the data without Netware being able to technically block it.
I recall (can't find any images on the Internet to back it up) that Microsoft changed the traditional 'hand under a folder' icon for this feature so that if you looked carefully, the hand had it's middle finger extended.
R Shift + L Shift + Alt + Esc would trigger the debugger. I would use that to get the console back after btrieve/pervasive.sql ABENDed to unmount volumes before restarting, otherwise NetWare would spend an hour or two running VREPAIR.
> showed us very early on how important physical security to even a keyboard was
My HS ran Novell in the 90s, and they learned this lesson after one of my friends (and fellow computer nerd) walked up to one of the 3 severs and typed DISABLE LOGIN (IIRC), thus locking out the math, English, and science teachers.
He spent the rest of the year disallowed from touching any computer in the school, which was interesting for our programming classes. I recall him making life for the librarians difficult by stopping by the library and making them look things up for him.
I worked at Oracle from 1993-1996, porting the Oracle database to Netware.
> Novell wouldn’t, or couldn’t, make Netware use task preemption and memory protection.
I actually remember being shown a pre-release version that had memory protection, at least. I don't recall if pre-emptive multitasking was included. It was a bit hacky; I think there was a kernel but then most of the OS ran in one process anyways, so perhaps it was a partial step. I think the problem was trying to be backwards compatible while shifting to the new memory model. Their development team was probably pretty small compared to something like Windows NT, so they didn't have the luxury of re-writing everything.
Looking at WikiPedia it is unclear if this upgrade was part of Netware 5 (released in 1998). Your other comment suggests maybe they killed this functionality. I was working for Microsoft by this point anyways. :-)
> There were some third party server applications built for Netware, I think maybe CC:mail server and Lotus Notes, but the memory protection and cooperative multitasking meant they didn’t last long.
We did actually have quite a few customers for the Oracle database on Netware. Mostly companies that were already locked into Netware for other reasons. In retrospect it does seem like madness to run an RDBMS on a server with no pre-emption or memory protection. I think the performance was pretty good, though. :-)
> Also Microsoft was at the height of its powers as a competition killing machine and nothing that stood in its way survived. It really genuinely looked back then like Microsoft was going to wipe out everything and it would be a Microsoft only future. Novell was no exception along with Lotus and Borland and many others.
This 100%. It felt absolutely inevitable that Windows NT was going to completely dominate this space once Microsoft came out with a competitive offering. And we didn't really know that Windows NT was a honest-to-goodness real operating system, instead of something hacked together on top of Windows for Workgroups (and DOS by extension). Of course, no one saw Linux coming at this point.
I don't remember... but it's long enough ago that that doesn't mean anything. Virtually everyone I knew there left the company around 1996 as the raises weren't keeping up with the market. New hires were making more than everyone else.
It seems silly today, but back in the 90s there was a pretty vocal (albeit small) contingent of people who didn’t like protected memory because of its performance impact, software compatibility issues, and reluctance to relearn some performance hacks.
Not just around Netware but on the MacOS side as well.
Oh yes - Amiga fans were loudly anti-protected memory, Archimedes / RiscOS users poo-poohed preemptive multi-tasking, and Mac owners claimed that neither was necessary.
I’m not old enough to remember, but does anyone know if there was ever a vocal anti-OS faction? It would seem logical, since an OS has a lot of overhead vs bare metal apps, and pre task switching OSs don’t offer much that can’t be implemented directly in each program.
The biggest issue for the entire industry at the time was the operating system. Everyone knew we needed real operating systems. Everyone was sick of crashing applications stomping on each other. Servers had just started to become a thing in the corporate world and server applications were just arriving. People were very interested in operating systems and where they were headed.
There wasn't even the concept of "bare metal" at the time. All DOS applications were bare metal. All Windows applications were cooperative multitasking and crashy. People were hungering for better.
Everyone expected that OS/2 was the server operating system that we would all be using. And indeed it probably would have been if Microsoft hadn't killed it. Lots of server applications got ported to OS/2 before Windows killed it stone dead.
My question was aimed at much earlier pre-DOS times, wondering if there was resistance to simple non multitasking OSs like DOS vs booting straight into the application. I was around and remember what you are describing.
Edit: for example, when I was in elementary school in the early 90s we had a lab of already antique Apple IIs, with no permanent storage or OS. We would just boot directly into programs on a floppy. Some of the programs themselves had simple features to save and open files.
There are people in the Amiga fandom who still believe this whole virtual memory fad is going to pass once people realize that AmigaOS EXEC was far more responsive in handling multiple tasks.
I don’t fully recall. But I believe passwords for Novell where stored in plaintext. With letters incremented and reversed. So getting admin privileges were crazy easy. All the computer people had admin at my high school. Found out a few years later that lots of grades had been changed for many students. School never caught on.
I don't think it was the OS that held NetWare back, rather it was the change in the CPU / memory / network / disk bandwidth balance.
Back when NetWare was being heavily used in the 1980s and early 1990s, 10Mbps ethernet was faster than accessing the local hard disk. ST506 (aka MFM) HDDs only have 5Mbps of bandwidth, and MS-DOS had no build in caching (until later releases -- maybe 5.x? My memory is fuzzy), but Novell NetWare ran in protected mode and had a real disk cache using all available memory on the server.
Once IDE HDDs became popular, the throughput of HDDs quickly began to exceed that of ethernet at the time. Once that happened, there was no benefit to centralizing storage resources on a file server when the local disk was far faster. It also didn't help that Windows NT was difficult to run over a network, but that was just another nail in the coffin.
I think that is a mistaken assumption. You have an effect, and you have a cause, but they are largely unrelated.
No, it didn't have preemption, or memory protection, early on, but that didn't matter because it was a file server and basically only a file server.
The Netware kernel was by and large a single binary running on a single core because that's all CPUs and PCs had then. It only did one job: reading stuff from data, sending it over the network, accepting stuff back and writing it.
It doesn't matter if you don't have memory protection if you only have one task. It doesn't matter if you can't preempt when there is only one thread.
When Netware was at its peak, it was the fastest fileserver there was, by quite a big margin, and that's all that mattered, because the apps executed on the client machines, not on the server.
I put in lots of Netware boxes and all they ran was Netware itself and nothing else. That's what it was for and what it was good at and all that I ever added anywhere was an on-server backup/restore tool, at the most.
Servers were not connected to the internet, and couldn't be, because Netware didn't include or use TCP/IP in the early days. They didn't route anything anywhere. There was nowhere to route it to or from, except other Netware servers on the same LAN.
They didn't have the killer feature you cite because there was no use for it.
I know that there were email servers -- that's where Pegasus got started. I know some people ran databases on it. I dealt with hundreds of clients from dozens of companies at 4-5 different employers and I never saw a single on-server app of any kind. No email, no databases, nothing.
It was a thing but not mainstream.
But when Windows NT came along, suddenly here was an OS that could be a stable file/print server and run apps as well.
You're saying that the world's best-selling bicycle lost out to motorcycles because it didn't have an engine. When it was the best-selling bicycle, motorcycles didn't exist yet. So it's true but it's not the cause. Motorbikes came along and allowed people to do a lot more stuff but bicycles still sell very well... without their engines.
What happened is that at Netware 4.x took over, Internet adoption spread at the same time. Suddenly ordinary small businesses wanted an email server, or a proxy server, and Novell did that -- for a price -- and they wanted it on the same expensive box.
And it wasn't very good at that. Then it became a problem, yes. But NT was doing well by then, it was a bit cheaper, client licenses were a bit cheaper, but more importantly, as others point out, NT didn't enforce client limitations whereas Netware did... and Netware was hard, while NT was easy.
So NT stole Netware's market out from under it.
Around the same time, the poor support for server apps became an issue. As did the difficulty of developing them.
Netware 4 let you push server apps out to a protection ring outside the kernel's Ring 0, but it cost performance. It did support some levels of protection but that was not the key thing.
NT was cheaper, easier, and while slower, ran server apps with aplomb. Even if Netware had been better at it, that wouldn't have saved it. It would still have been harder, meaning it required more skill of admins and developers... and it would still have been more expensive.
So, you're right, it was an issue -- but I think it was not actually a make-it-or-break it issue.
NDS made life hard for small businesses, who didn't want it or need it. An enterprise feature foisted onto SMEs.
And a new competitor, who was better in ways much more important than the ways it was weaker.
Developing NLMs for Novell Netware was my first job and here is my take:
I think Novell lost its focus and the other market factors also played a role. Novell's decline started when they also tried to compete with Microsoft for Wordprocessor market. Novell's then CEO became obsessed with beating Microsoft at everything . And also the Netware Directory services began losing to Active Directory as Windows 98 shipped with AD client built into it where as one had to manually install NDS clients on Windows. It was simply easier to manage your Windows deployments with AD than NDS. Moreover, IBM throwing in the towel with OS/2 ceded the desktop market to Microsoft Windows AD became the natural solution for managing and administering those desktops.
Novell users at the time 4.0 came out had no clue what a Directory was, and why they should use it. They were quite used to v3.11, and everybody turned their back on v4.0 as too complex, totally unneeded, and why bother.
By the time Microsoft AD came around, there were actual uses for Microsoft AD, and plenty of buy-in.
Did NDS ever have the equivalent of Windows 2000 Group Policy? And when, if so? Any discussion of dominance of Windows Sever that doesn't mention GPOs is missing the layer that finished off anything competing. Very that's in GP on server 2022 wasn't in Win2k, outside of controlling features as they were added.
The war against Novell was basically already won by the time group policy was introduced. That being said Novell introduced Novell Application Launcher in 1996 which had some of the features of group policy. Novell introduced ZENworks in 1998 which would have been much more of a competitor to GPO.
When Microsoft went from simple domains to AD around 2000 they really streaked ahead on the management side. Novell did have something comparable - was it called Zen or something - and it looked decent but Novell just didn’t have the numbers.
I was a CNE back in the 3.11 days and Microsoft was giving me training and cert vouchers. Novel made me pay a ton to keep my certs. I eventually went Windows.
NDS was overkill for what was effectively a departmental file and print server.
NetWare failed to innovate as an application server platform - NT had a much richer API.
NT was also viewed as much more easy to administer. This was a double edged sword as many people at the time didn’t (or wouldn’t) acknowledge it as a serious server platform due to having a GUI. Also it enabled many people to run servers who had no business running servers (tubes screensaver anyone?)
Finally Novell was really late grokking the internet. I remember running early NetWare 4.0x and trying to configure TCP/IP and having to configure IP addresses as dotted HEX quads. At that point I mentally flipped the bozo bit on them.
Around 2006-7 we added an Active Directory personality to NDS, called Domain Services for Windows. It was an interesting piece of engineering that highlighted both the similarities and differences between the two technologies. (Note that it ran on OES Linux only, not NetWare.)
All I remember about Novell is that you could install games on a school network locally, but often couldn't launch them. That was okay because adding a link in Powerpoint to an EXE which would then be executed because Powerpoint could.
Back in university days, I worked for a small department that had NetWare 3 Server. It was mostly used for printer sharing and email, using Pegasus Mail as the the client. I mostly remember a separate PC that ran Charon gateway to bridge the TCP/IP SMTP divide to provide larger Internet mail relay.
The educational pricing for NetWare 4 wasn’t too bad and spent one summer planning and upgrading to it. Since it was small department it wasn’t too bad to administer, but could see the writing on the wall about the difficulties dealing with NDS clients on Windows and Mac workstations.
Don’t know what happened to the systems after graduation, but assume some of it was eventually consolidated due to security. All the desktops and servers had direct Internet connections and were not NAT’d nor had hardware firewall. That could not have lasted too many more years in the late 90’s.
My first job in IT was implementing a NetWare 3.0 environment for a law firm. Eventually we used their distributed office system to network between three branches using modems to move shared documents and email once an hour. When I moved to another law firm a few years later, with a mature NetWare system in place, I evaluated and tested Windows 95 and saw the effort Microsoft put into making sure NetWare networking worked well in the new system...NT was a thing then, but they knew NetWare was the dominant enterprise networking system.
> Using a file server meant that PCs could share data with one another, for example permitting the first network-aware PC program of any kind – Novell’s network game SNIPES
Utter garbage. He didn't even say "first game" which would have been tougher.
"first network-aware PC program" ?? get real.
> Novell’s proprietary IPX/SPX protocol
Which were Xerox's XNS protocols in all but name.
> TCP/IP – or Internet Protocol as we used to call it
No, we called it "TCP"
LAN Manager was a "joint effort" with 3Com (where I was). It was a stunningly bad deal for 3Com and we hated Microsoft at the time. It was Gates' first attempt to defeat Novell, and it failed at that.
All the same, Novell wiped the floor with 3Com in the 80s. Their stuff ran on every LAN hardware and ours, of course, only ran on Ethernet.
second this - I saw TCP/IP protocol running alongside other network protocols on Ethernet cables at that time. There was fierce business competition already; the technical media usually parroted the marketing leads from the various companies. Within technical academia (ivory tower) and close dot-mil (ARPA) they didn't make much of a public msg, so Byte Magazine readers didn't hear that terminology. Here in California, I never heard anyone say "Internet Protocol" in those days, not once.
Re Snipes: I know of no earlier network-native app for the DOS PC.
It's described on Wikipedia as "Snipes [aka 'NSnipes' for 'Network Snipes'] is the first network application ever written for a commercial personal computer"
If you have a pointer to anything earlier, I'd welcome it, but after all this time I doubt my editors will change the article. :-)
IPX/SPX was indeed based on XNS, as was Banyan's version, but it wasn't compatible with it. IPX was, I suspect, vastly more widely used than any other flavour of XNS ever.
> No, we called it "TCP"
Hey, it's a big planet, you know. You used 3 of the 5 letters, some others used the other 2 letters, or to make it easier, the words they stood for.
I was at a Netware place where a lot of us used System 7 then OS 8 Macs, and the in-house Solaris webserver was actually where a lot of our network files were since the Novell "client" was a little weird on early Macs. We stuck early OSX on soemthing, went to Network, and a few heads exploded.
Novell and NetWare to me is an illustration of how tough it is to kill companies. Even today they get upwards of 500 million on NetWare revenue. We, in the tech field, are scored about new tech but it’s a great thing to see that most people look at tech as a tool, if it works why bother touching it? NetWare, works and works very well for a given task.
Everything else on the network ran Windows. A windows power user could sort-of admin a Windows network, it was easy. All the applications ran on Windows since VB, Access, and Foxpro made it easy for people to build stuff.
It's that simple. NT being an insecure, slow system that required a reboot every month didn't prevent it from taking over. And ten years later, Microsoft made most of those things better (but didn't fix them anywhere close to 100%)
I worked for Apple porting Netware to the first PowerPC machines for an Apple server code named that was released with AIX running on it. The Netware project was cancelled as it was about to enter Beta as both companies were hitting hard times. This was in the last days of Spindler’s reign.
The only thing Netware had to their advantage was a network of CNEs that made lots of money setting up and maintaining systems. But for small companies it was very expensive and large companies unnecessary as they had internal staffs that were not interested in another OS they had to train staff on. It also made them dependent upon 3rd parties to sell their systems and while it worked for awhile they in the long term will never be loyal.
The fact that the company lived so long on protocols ripped off from Xerox (they use to point people to Xerox documentation) is a mystery.
Netware was far more expensive than NT server. Most smaller businesses couldn’t afford or needed directory services that Novell offered. Add in the fact that once NT 4 came out with easier to use GUI tools, Netware was done. Their product was stable, we had 2 big computer labs and printers running off one server It never crashed. I remember having to restart a print queue every so often though.
I remember Netware. Not that I used it myself, this is what I heard from others.
Everyone used Netware because they had to. Everybody hated it. I never heard a nice thing said about it.
When another, better, networking solution arrived, that was the end of Novell.
I learned to never invest in a company whose products people use only because they had to. They're doomed. Invest in companies where people love the products.
P.S. really bad investments are companies that like to sue their customers.
127 comments
[ 5.6 ms ] story [ 96.3 ms ] threadhttps://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1993...
> The NetWare operating system installed on the server computer acts as a traffic cop, masterminding the flow of information over a network. (The latest version costs $4,695 for 25 users, $47,995 for 1,000.)
NT was definitely cheaper, too. That made a difference in small deployments where I was often getting nickel-and-dimed.
Microsoft's license was soft, and depending on the customer buying enough paper to cover, if you could even find a reseller that could describe how to properly license Windows Server (exteremely doubtful).
OOTH, Novell's licensing was a hard limit. Once that # of workstations logged in, those without a license were hosed.
On all the jobs I did in those days, Novell networks at each customer site _never_ had enough licenses to cover every workstation. There was always somebody left out and they had to go bug people to see if they were done with the network so they could get in their tasks. Nobody ever seemed to overprovision their licenses to cover every single workstation (or even to have extra).
I never met a company using Microsoft server that properly had their CALs licensed, and they didn't want to hear it from me. Finding somebody to sell you the proper CALs was an interesting exercise.
Most other network server OSes at the time (the Unix vendors were trying hard in this space in those early days too) also had hard licenses. Which was part of why they didn't gain traction at all.
They could easily break the fake KMS but choose not to. It speaks a lot to their priorities.
Microsoft can tell us all they want that the telemetry is just for product usage. When the first slow quarter comes around they're going to gaze longingly at that huge treasure trove of data they have and start asking themselves if selling it won't help them meet their quarterly projections.
I'm unsure if this still works with Windows 11, but judging by how the upgrade process works, I would guess so.
- Bill Gates
Every small business was going to be running Windows already, so an NT server was kind of a logical conclusion. Couple that with the fact that the NT server was likely cheaper to license (even if it was ultimately not properly licensed), and that the NT server at least offered the appearance of being more flexible and capable than a Novell server, and it made sense that NetWare died off.
As a reseller, I also seem to recall needing to have a bunch of techs certified on all the various Novell apps to get a good discount. I remember going for my Groupwise certification specifically so our company could get a better discount level from Novell to try and be more competitive. I think I only ever installed one GroupWise deployment.
$4,695 in 1993 is worth $9,682 today.
$47,995 is worth $98,982 today
If we are talking confusions that killed netware, my money is on marketing "network operating system" as opposed to "buy microsoft NT on your server to run your network"
Netware's demise was a matter of time. I am reading other comments here stating that it was the lack of preemptive multitasking that doomed it. Not even close. Netware was a feature mascarading as an OS.
- http://www.mindcraft.com/whitepapers/nts4nw5filesvr.html
- http://web.archive.org/web/19990220215149/http://www.novell....
- http://www.mindcraft.com/whitepapers/response-novell-nts4nw5...
Noorda made it go up, and he saw the beginnings of it going back down and that's when Schmidt was hired, probably in an attempt to turn the tide and avoid the inevitable victory of Microsoft over Novell. But Microsoft really had an unfair advantage and personally I do not think Novell ever had a realistic chance of staying in the race in the longer term.
He tried to bring it back but it was too late. Nothing he did could have mattered.
Because the biggest reason Netware lost was the inability to develop software on the platform.
This severely limited the value of Netware as a server operating system, as developers (for the most part) prefer to develop on the the platform (cross-compiling for other flavors of *nix doesn't count) for which they're developing software.
What's more, IIUC, the development tools for Netware were just awful. Which additionally limited the number of developers working on Netware-related applications.
And even those few folks mostly abandoned it as NT gained popularity as a server and a development platform. Had there been a robust user/development environment (like Unix), that likely wouldn't have happened.
[0] I am aware that Netware was mostly written in x86 assembler, but porting IPX/SPX and a few other bits and bobs would have allowed Novell to migrate to a Unix platform without having to rewrite the entire OS.
There was also a FOSS NetWare server for Linux at the same time too
A source, ironically from Novell docs.
https://www.novell.com/documentation/suse91/suselinux-adming...
It only emulated Netware 2/3, not the later NDS versions.
Uhh...The millions of clients who didn't have IP stacks?
I'd note that Novell didn't include an IP stack in Netware until 1996[0]. By then they'd already lost to Microsoft.
And they'd purchased Unix more than three years earlier, but didn't port Netware to Unix at all. Rather it was Netware on Linux, and wasn't released until 2005 -- when Netware was already irrelevant.
Had they migrated to Unix in the 1993-1994 time frame they would have eaten Microsoft's lunch. But they didn't. And so they lost. And they are gone.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetWare#NetWare_4.x
It’s a startling deficiency that killed its chances of becoming a general purpose server.
Without these things, the Netware server couldn’t be trusted to run independent applications.
There were some third party server applications built for Netware, I think maybe CC:mail server and Lotus Notes, but the memory protection and cooperative multitasking meant they didn’t last long.
I don’t know if this is true but I heard it was Drew Major who made this call, which IMO killed Netware.
The justification I heard at the time was that memory protection was too slow. Better slow than dead. I think Novell just didn’t have the technical chops to do it.
Also Microsoft was at the height of its powers as a competition killing machine and nothing that stood in its way survived. It really genuinely looked back then like Microsoft was going to wipe out everything and it would be a Microsoft only future. Novell was no exception along with Lotus and Borland and many others.
But on the original topic, yes once you've got a 286+ there's no excuse for your OS not having true memory protection.
Despite that Mac continued with only partial process protection up until the release of OSX in the early 2000s.
My point is their problem wasn't hardware support, but software compatibility.
The newer Mac II's (IIx onward) were 68030-based, so they would've had MMUs built in. (They also released the Mac LC later on, which was 68020 based and had no socket for an MMU.)
Was Win95 preemptive or cooperative? I totally forget. Pretty sure only the NT versions of windows were preemptive.
I recall there was a period of time when you’d run Windows 2000 because it was so much more stable than 98/ME. It worked mostly okay but it didn’t have as good of support for gaming and was pretty late to the party with DirectX support.
They obviously had to make compromises for performance and compatibility’s sake that made the long term move to NT essential, but I feel like the Chicago kernel team’s efforts have never (to my knowledge) been well-documented or -appreciated.
A/UX ran with memory protection on the 68020 Mac II in 1988, probably in 1987 in beta also.
The book is "In Search of stupidity" by Merrill R. Chapman, this particular topic is covered on page 173-174.
except for the thousands of companies, academics and individuals who said NO
There was mostly a lot of appetite from both buyers and application vendors to standardize at the operating system level--which Unix in the mid-90s decidedly was not. There was an effort to come up with a multi-vendor Unix, which SCO predictably screwed up in their pre-lawsuit guise. Linux would eventually mature sufficiently and gain business support for this role on servers but that didn't really happen in a major way until the 2000s, accelerated by IBM's endorsement.
I worked in the heart of the corporate world and at this time the sentiment has changed from "you can't get fired buying IBM" to "you can't get fired buying Microsoft".
As @gaff said in this thread said - it has nothing to do with Microsoft ad spend or what the magazines said - it was dead obvious. And were it not for Linux then it would have been a Microsoft world. Remember also it was Microsoft that saved Apple from bankruptcy when jobs returned. I do think that if not Linux then FreePSD would likely have become todays "Linux".
[0] https://bitmason.blogspot.com/2020/06/podcast-was-open-sourc...
MSDOS on the PC was clearly not suitable for real business apps. Well not for networked ones. Well not for ones that need a server. Well not for GUI apps. Well not for apps that needed more powerful CPUs than those you x86 chips.
Wait.. why are all our customers on Windows NT on Pentiums?
One of the major SQL database vendors (maybe Sybase?) actually ported their product to NetWare. But no one bought it due to the problems you stated.
The NetWare development tools were also terrible. Whereas the early Windows NT development tools were actually pretty good. Unlike with NetWare, NT allowed developers to code on a workstation platform and then deploy on a server platform with an identical API which was a huge factor in getting third-party developers onboard.
On the other hand why hasn't anyone implemented a recycle bin like they did? (Your whole drive was your recycle bin.) And the users really loved the feature that said "this drawing is locked by <station name>" that I can see no way to implement under any other system.
There was a guy at our office that was extremely proficient with Netware, so much so that if he got physical access to a Netware server, he could press the special 'Admin key sequence' (from memory it was about 4 keys pressed at once on the keyboard) and then he would issue commands to peek into memory and tell you the Admin password. This trick only worked if you had already unlocked the screen console with the Admin account since the server booted, but it showed us very early on how important physical security to even a keyboard was.
I do remember a key fight that happened back then with Netware and Microsoft was how Netware gave you a free 2 user license to a server if that server was only running network services, such as maybe a DHCP server. If you wanted to do file sharing, then you had to buy the appropriate user license.
Microsoft introduced the ability for a Windows NT server to mount a share locally where the contents of that share was data from a Netware server. This way you could get a free 2 user Netware server license, have the NT server use one of those licenses, and then hundreds of people could access the data without Netware being able to technically block it.
I recall (can't find any images on the Internet to back it up) that Microsoft changed the traditional 'hand under a folder' icon for this feature so that if you looked carefully, the hand had it's middle finger extended.
R Shift + L Shift + Alt + Esc would trigger the debugger. I would use that to get the console back after btrieve/pervasive.sql ABENDed to unmount volumes before restarting, otherwise NetWare would spend an hour or two running VREPAIR.
My HS ran Novell in the 90s, and they learned this lesson after one of my friends (and fellow computer nerd) walked up to one of the 3 severs and typed DISABLE LOGIN (IIRC), thus locking out the math, English, and science teachers.
He spent the rest of the year disallowed from touching any computer in the school, which was interesting for our programming classes. I recall him making life for the librarians difficult by stopping by the library and making them look things up for him.
> Novell wouldn’t, or couldn’t, make Netware use task preemption and memory protection.
I actually remember being shown a pre-release version that had memory protection, at least. I don't recall if pre-emptive multitasking was included. It was a bit hacky; I think there was a kernel but then most of the OS ran in one process anyways, so perhaps it was a partial step. I think the problem was trying to be backwards compatible while shifting to the new memory model. Their development team was probably pretty small compared to something like Windows NT, so they didn't have the luxury of re-writing everything.
Looking at WikiPedia it is unclear if this upgrade was part of Netware 5 (released in 1998). Your other comment suggests maybe they killed this functionality. I was working for Microsoft by this point anyways. :-)
> There were some third party server applications built for Netware, I think maybe CC:mail server and Lotus Notes, but the memory protection and cooperative multitasking meant they didn’t last long.
We did actually have quite a few customers for the Oracle database on Netware. Mostly companies that were already locked into Netware for other reasons. In retrospect it does seem like madness to run an RDBMS on a server with no pre-emption or memory protection. I think the performance was pretty good, though. :-)
> Also Microsoft was at the height of its powers as a competition killing machine and nothing that stood in its way survived. It really genuinely looked back then like Microsoft was going to wipe out everything and it would be a Microsoft only future. Novell was no exception along with Lotus and Borland and many others.
This 100%. It felt absolutely inevitable that Windows NT was going to completely dominate this space once Microsoft came out with a competitive offering. And we didn't really know that Windows NT was a honest-to-goodness real operating system, instead of something hacked together on top of Windows for Workgroups (and DOS by extension). Of course, no one saw Linux coming at this point.
Not just around Netware but on the MacOS side as well.
The biggest issue for the entire industry at the time was the operating system. Everyone knew we needed real operating systems. Everyone was sick of crashing applications stomping on each other. Servers had just started to become a thing in the corporate world and server applications were just arriving. People were very interested in operating systems and where they were headed.
There wasn't even the concept of "bare metal" at the time. All DOS applications were bare metal. All Windows applications were cooperative multitasking and crashy. People were hungering for better.
Everyone expected that OS/2 was the server operating system that we would all be using. And indeed it probably would have been if Microsoft hadn't killed it. Lots of server applications got ported to OS/2 before Windows killed it stone dead.
Edit: for example, when I was in elementary school in the early 90s we had a lab of already antique Apple IIs, with no permanent storage or OS. We would just boot directly into programs on a floppy. Some of the programs themselves had simple features to save and open files.
Back when NetWare was being heavily used in the 1980s and early 1990s, 10Mbps ethernet was faster than accessing the local hard disk. ST506 (aka MFM) HDDs only have 5Mbps of bandwidth, and MS-DOS had no build in caching (until later releases -- maybe 5.x? My memory is fuzzy), but Novell NetWare ran in protected mode and had a real disk cache using all available memory on the server.
Once IDE HDDs became popular, the throughput of HDDs quickly began to exceed that of ethernet at the time. Once that happened, there was no benefit to centralizing storage resources on a file server when the local disk was far faster. It also didn't help that Windows NT was difficult to run over a network, but that was just another nail in the coffin.
I think that is a mistaken assumption. You have an effect, and you have a cause, but they are largely unrelated.
No, it didn't have preemption, or memory protection, early on, but that didn't matter because it was a file server and basically only a file server.
The Netware kernel was by and large a single binary running on a single core because that's all CPUs and PCs had then. It only did one job: reading stuff from data, sending it over the network, accepting stuff back and writing it.
It doesn't matter if you don't have memory protection if you only have one task. It doesn't matter if you can't preempt when there is only one thread.
When Netware was at its peak, it was the fastest fileserver there was, by quite a big margin, and that's all that mattered, because the apps executed on the client machines, not on the server.
I put in lots of Netware boxes and all they ran was Netware itself and nothing else. That's what it was for and what it was good at and all that I ever added anywhere was an on-server backup/restore tool, at the most.
Servers were not connected to the internet, and couldn't be, because Netware didn't include or use TCP/IP in the early days. They didn't route anything anywhere. There was nowhere to route it to or from, except other Netware servers on the same LAN.
They didn't have the killer feature you cite because there was no use for it.
I know that there were email servers -- that's where Pegasus got started. I know some people ran databases on it. I dealt with hundreds of clients from dozens of companies at 4-5 different employers and I never saw a single on-server app of any kind. No email, no databases, nothing.
It was a thing but not mainstream.
But when Windows NT came along, suddenly here was an OS that could be a stable file/print server and run apps as well.
You're saying that the world's best-selling bicycle lost out to motorcycles because it didn't have an engine. When it was the best-selling bicycle, motorcycles didn't exist yet. So it's true but it's not the cause. Motorbikes came along and allowed people to do a lot more stuff but bicycles still sell very well... without their engines.
What happened is that at Netware 4.x took over, Internet adoption spread at the same time. Suddenly ordinary small businesses wanted an email server, or a proxy server, and Novell did that -- for a price -- and they wanted it on the same expensive box.
And it wasn't very good at that. Then it became a problem, yes. But NT was doing well by then, it was a bit cheaper, client licenses were a bit cheaper, but more importantly, as others point out, NT didn't enforce client limitations whereas Netware did... and Netware was hard, while NT was easy.
So NT stole Netware's market out from under it.
Around the same time, the poor support for server apps became an issue. As did the difficulty of developing them.
Netware 4 let you push server apps out to a protection ring outside the kernel's Ring 0, but it cost performance. It did support some levels of protection but that was not the key thing.
NT was cheaper, easier, and while slower, ran server apps with aplomb. Even if Netware had been better at it, that wouldn't have saved it. It would still have been harder, meaning it required more skill of admins and developers... and it would still have been more expensive.
So, you're right, it was an issue -- but I think it was not actually a make-it-or-break it issue.
NDS made life hard for small businesses, who didn't want it or need it. An enterprise feature foisted onto SMEs.
And a new competitor, who was better in ways much more important than the ways it was weaker.
I think Novell lost its focus and the other market factors also played a role. Novell's decline started when they also tried to compete with Microsoft for Wordprocessor market. Novell's then CEO became obsessed with beating Microsoft at everything . And also the Netware Directory services began losing to Active Directory as Windows 98 shipped with AD client built into it where as one had to manually install NDS clients on Windows. It was simply easier to manage your Windows deployments with AD than NDS. Moreover, IBM throwing in the towel with OS/2 ceded the desktop market to Microsoft Windows AD became the natural solution for managing and administering those desktops.
By the time Microsoft AD came around, there were actual uses for Microsoft AD, and plenty of buy-in.
NetWare failed to innovate as an application server platform - NT had a much richer API.
NT was also viewed as much more easy to administer. This was a double edged sword as many people at the time didn’t (or wouldn’t) acknowledge it as a serious server platform due to having a GUI. Also it enabled many people to run servers who had no business running servers (tubes screensaver anyone?)
Finally Novell was really late grokking the internet. I remember running early NetWare 4.0x and trying to configure TCP/IP and having to configure IP addresses as dotted HEX quads. At that point I mentally flipped the bozo bit on them.
This is something I wrote in the early 2000s when they were making another (and pretty much last) attempt with SUSE. http://bitmasons.com.s3-website-us-east-1.amazonaws.com/pubs...
The educational pricing for NetWare 4 wasn’t too bad and spent one summer planning and upgrading to it. Since it was small department it wasn’t too bad to administer, but could see the writing on the wall about the difficulties dealing with NDS clients on Windows and Mac workstations.
Don’t know what happened to the systems after graduation, but assume some of it was eventually consolidated due to security. All the desktops and servers had direct Internet connections and were not NAT’d nor had hardware firewall. That could not have lasted too many more years in the late 90’s.
> Using a file server meant that PCs could share data with one another, for example permitting the first network-aware PC program of any kind – Novell’s network game SNIPES
Utter garbage. He didn't even say "first game" which would have been tougher. "first network-aware PC program" ?? get real.
> Novell’s proprietary IPX/SPX protocol
Which were Xerox's XNS protocols in all but name.
> TCP/IP – or Internet Protocol as we used to call it
No, we called it "TCP"
LAN Manager was a "joint effort" with 3Com (where I was). It was a stunningly bad deal for 3Com and we hated Microsoft at the time. It was Gates' first attempt to defeat Novell, and it failed at that.
All the same, Novell wiped the floor with 3Com in the 80s. Their stuff ran on every LAN hardware and ours, of course, only ran on Ethernet.
Re Snipes: I know of no earlier network-native app for the DOS PC.
It's described on Wikipedia as "Snipes [aka 'NSnipes' for 'Network Snipes'] is the first network application ever written for a commercial personal computer"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetWare
A citation: https://web.archive.org/web/20160728221417/http://www.textmo...
If you have a pointer to anything earlier, I'd welcome it, but after all this time I doubt my editors will change the article. :-)
IPX/SPX was indeed based on XNS, as was Banyan's version, but it wasn't compatible with it. IPX was, I suspect, vastly more widely used than any other flavour of XNS ever.
> No, we called it "TCP"
Hey, it's a big planet, you know. You used 3 of the 5 letters, some others used the other 2 letters, or to make it easier, the words they stood for.
It's that simple. NT being an insecure, slow system that required a reboot every month didn't prevent it from taking over. And ten years later, Microsoft made most of those things better (but didn't fix them anywhere close to 100%)
The only thing Netware had to their advantage was a network of CNEs that made lots of money setting up and maintaining systems. But for small companies it was very expensive and large companies unnecessary as they had internal staffs that were not interested in another OS they had to train staff on. It also made them dependent upon 3rd parties to sell their systems and while it worked for awhile they in the long term will never be loyal.
The fact that the company lived so long on protocols ripped off from Xerox (they use to point people to Xerox documentation) is a mystery.
http://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2021/10/shiner-esb-apple-network-...
Everyone used Netware because they had to. Everybody hated it. I never heard a nice thing said about it.
When another, better, networking solution arrived, that was the end of Novell.
I learned to never invest in a company whose products people use only because they had to. They're doomed. Invest in companies where people love the products.
P.S. really bad investments are companies that like to sue their customers.