1989 Networking: NetWare 386

I remember the first release of NetWare 386 very well; it was a breeze to install, but the early version had a bug and if you unplugged the 10Base2 coax from the server it would crash. Apparently, the routine to display a warning message on the console had an issue. Novell issued a patch NLM.

I had one site that experienced random crashes, but it was not the aforementioned bug. Long story short: After about two months of sleuthing, working with Novell and Compaq, camping on site and driving to/from the office to site (about 2hr each way), I found that it was a mains spike caused by a dishwasher right up against the server room wall in the next room.

The fix was to move the Compaq server, which was actually a large desktop model, on its table to the opposite end of the server room.

Imho the entire LAN culture of the 90's was enabled by being able to join in for the cost of a coffee and people would often have a few spare cards for those that showed up to the party without one.

However, by the mid 1990s it was clear that Windows NT and the TCP/IP protocol of the Internet would soon make Novell and NetWare fade into the sunset.

The company was a PC builder that wanted to get into software, but they also did some services work like installing Netware. They were a fairly sizable local operation until one day when they won a large bid for computers for the local University by bidding based on a projected continuing drop in components, and then an unexpected supply problem pushed prices significantly up. This was after I left the company, but they seemed to go bankrupt basically overnight.

After you got it working right, NetWare was rock-solid. Though if you weren't seriously experienced with NetWare, the "got it working right" could be difficult to distinguish from "went through Hell".

But once MS's OS's grew up enough to cope with running a serious fileserver, NetWare was doomed. Didn't matter that MS OS's were pretty mediocre. Their business strategy was good and ruthless, they had vastly more money, NetWare was a lone-niche product, and Novell wasn't very good at either business strategy, nor bigger-picture technical management.

It was also arguably the most advanced server on the Intel platform.

There was a moment in time when it looked like Novell might become THE corporate back end server technology and all sorts of servers were built to run on Netware. I think there was Oracle and Lotus Notes and CC Mail and some others

However, Novell for whatever reason simply didn't make Netware robust. Netware needed to be memory protected and have task preemption and it did neither, making it unsuitable as a server. Why they refused to do this is unclear. I seem to recall reading that Drew Major didn't have the technical chops to make it happen. I also recall reading that Drew Major believed that task preemption and memory protection were slow, and that speed was more important.

Also, Netware was late to the party with TCP/IP support - they were all in on IPX/SPX and in the end TCP won the entire protocol game, sending IPX/SPX, XNS and other common network protocols to the dustbin.

Anyhow Microsoft came along with Windows NT and OS/2 and stomped on Novell and since Netware wasn't up to the job, the show was over.

[0] http://www.novell.com/documentation/ncl_sle_11/login/data/h5...

This led directly to the engineers' slogan:

"Strategic" means "you don't make any money"

However an expensive niche fileserver OS—which made a lot of sense in the 80s—was simply not needed any longer as hardware, storage, and OS commoditization happened over the next twenty years. Moore’s law was not kind to it.

Novell got hit in the head by NT and the internet, and below the belt by Linux, and went down for the count. Was sad the day I removed it from my resume.

In those days "marketing" meant uploading the executable to Simtel (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simtel) and they would "announce" it. Getting those random checks in the mail from some company or college I never heard of was pretty cool.

Anyway, since the desktops were pretty tightly controlled, we ended up storing a copy of Unreal Tournament 99 out on the school's file share. It was buried several directories deep with some innocuous filename to help prevent detection.

Each day before class started, a group of us would login, download the UT99 files, and drop into a LAN game. We had basic Dell Dimension systems but they were more than adequate for the game, so we'd frag it out every day for 10-20 minutes before class.

https://www.abortretry.fail/p/the-history-of-novell

The kock.exe turned every account into administrators. Guess who was caught using it in secondary school :)