[HN Gopher] How Novell Netware lost the battle against Windows N...
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How Novell Netware lost the battle against Windows NT (2013)
Author : lproven
Score : 79 points
Date : 2022-12-28 14:27 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.theregister.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.theregister.com)
| Jemm wrote:
| I was team Lantastic. Still have the swag.
| [deleted]
| oldnetguy wrote:
| 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.
| mleo wrote:
| 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.
| rzzzt wrote:
| I remember one benchmark that made some waves around 1998-1999:
|
| - http://www.mindcraft.com/whitepapers/nts4nw5filesvr.html
|
| - http://web.archive.org/web/19990220215149/http://www.novell....
|
| - http://www.mindcraft.com/whitepapers/response-novell-nts4nw5...
| yalogin wrote:
| 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.
| bluedino wrote:
| 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%)
| vsareto wrote:
| 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.
| efitz wrote:
| 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.
| bluedino wrote:
| I worked at a team blue and team red shop, NDS was amazing
| compared to AD.
| efitz wrote:
| The Microsoft code name for services for NetWare was "Visine"
| because "it gets the red out".
| lukeh wrote:
| 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.)
| ghaff wrote:
| Pretty much. Basically they could never recapture the NetWare
| magic.
|
| 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...
| turbobooster wrote:
| An old friend told me years ago Eric Schmidt was what ruined
| Novell. Do other people believe that?
| jacquesm wrote:
| 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.
| ido wrote:
| Why is Eric Schmidt one of the biggest hypocrites alive?
| jacquesm wrote:
| 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.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Your old friend is full of it.
|
| He tried to bring it back but it was too late. Nothing he did
| could have mattered.
| manishsharan wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| nobody9999 wrote:
| 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.
| timbit42 wrote:
| What would be the benefit of porting IPX/SPX to Unix? Netware
| already ran on TCP/IP.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| I remember back when doing LAN parties and stuff IPX/SPX for
| some reason always seemed to work better for games.
| nobody9999 wrote:
| >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.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetWare#NetWare_4.x
| nradov wrote:
| Novell actually did port NetWare networking services to Unix in
| 2005 but by that point it was too late.
| [deleted]
| wslh wrote:
| 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.
| andrewstuart wrote:
| 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.
| efitz wrote:
| I remember that the beat practice was to reboot your NetWare
| servers every weekend to work around the leaky NLMs :-)
| mistrial9 wrote:
| > genuinely looked back then like Microsoft was going to wipe
| out everything
|
| except for the thousands of companies, academics and
| individuals who said NO
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| 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..
| browningstreet wrote:
| 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.
| TheRealDunkirk wrote:
| 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.
| ghaff wrote:
| 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.
| layer8 wrote:
| Thousands!
| nradov wrote:
| 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.
| gadders wrote:
| I think there was also a Lotus Notes server for NLM.
| mobilio wrote:
| Also Gupta SQL for NetWare
| geoffdunbar wrote:
| 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.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Did we know each other? (Oracle, 1991-98). I wrote two
| articles about it on my Substack,
| https://albertcory50.substack.com).
| geoffdunbar wrote:
| 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.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| if you read my second article: managing then absolutely
| _sucked_. You couldn 't hire anyone.
| treeman79 wrote:
| 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.
| spamizbad wrote:
| 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.
| roryirvine wrote:
| 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.
| calrain wrote:
| 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.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Desqview had that more or less solved, I wonder why Novell
| couldn't.
| mike_hearn wrote:
| 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.
| jacquesm wrote:
| 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).
| rwmj wrote:
| 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.
| monocasa wrote:
| The 68851 was more than up to the task, to say nothing of
| PowerPC chips.
| jacquesm wrote:
| 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.
| monocasa wrote:
| It started with the 68020 which came out with 68851
| support in an Apple product in 1987.
|
| 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.
| spookthesunset wrote:
| 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.
| twoodfin wrote:
| 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.
| monocasa wrote:
| 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.
| burnte wrote:
| 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.
| kjs3 wrote:
| Not that Apple used it, but the even earlier 68010+68451
| gave you segmented (not paged) memory protection.
| Maursault wrote:
| > software compatibility
|
| A/UX ran with memory protection on the 68020 Mac II in
| 1988, probably in 1987 in beta also.
| jacquesm wrote:
| 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.
| mrweasel wrote:
| 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.
| vhold wrote:
| This article from 1993 has the most important detail missing from
| the Register article:
|
| https://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.)_
| jon-wood wrote:
| 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.
| tssva wrote:
| 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.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| 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.
| merlyn wrote:
| 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.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| MSFT licensing being "soft" with enforcement has always
| seemed like a major strategic advantage for them.
| TillE wrote:
| 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.
| Karunamon wrote:
| 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.
| robotnikman wrote:
| 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.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| 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).
| robotnikman wrote:
| 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.
| Alupis wrote:
| You can still use a Windows 7, 8, or 8.1 license to
| activate Windows 10.
|
| I'm unsure if this still works with Windows 11, but
| judging by how the upgrade process works, I would guess
| so.
| EvanAnderson wrote:
| 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.
| brk wrote:
| 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.
| themadturk wrote:
| 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.
| Neil44 wrote:
| I remember there being a Microsoft netware client right up to
| XP, not sure about 7 as most customers got rid of their netware
| by then.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| 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"
| jacquesm wrote:
| 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.
| lifeisstillgood wrote:
| 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.
| starik36 wrote:
| 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.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| Some nits first:
|
| > 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.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| 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.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| everything was a TLA then.
| manishsharan wrote:
| 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.
| merlyn wrote:
| 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.
| tssva wrote:
| I had several customers that ran large NDS instances covering
| 10s of thousands of users distributed globally.
| Neil44 wrote:
| 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.
| smm11 wrote:
| 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.
| mistrial9 wrote:
| early OSX being NeXTStep, not A/UX I would think.. all of this
| was very early days
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