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1989 Networking: NetWare 386

by supermatou on 7/20/24, 12:51 PM with 86 comments

  • by mccrory on 7/20/24, 2:26 PM

    MCNE/MCSE here from the mid-90’s, agree it was obvious that Netware would likely fade. Windows NT 3.51 (even though it wasn’t as good at the time), was more user friendly and had the Windows interface, compatibility, etc etc However, it NT wasn’t remotely as stable as Netware at that time either. Then we got to watch as Novell slowly went insane competing and buying WordPerfect and doing all sorts of other crazy moves. I still wish that Novell had taken all of its money and bought VMware when they were just working on GSX/ESX (now vSphere). This would have changed the trajectory of both Novell and the market.

  • by linker3000 on 7/20/24, 3:41 PM

    I was a systems engineer and also taught NetWare admin classes. I also worked with Novell to update their training material.

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

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

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

  • by AnotherGoodName on 7/20/24, 9:45 PM

    A big cultural outcome of Netware was the shear volume of highly compatible Novell network cards that flooded the market. Novell charged a fortune for Netware licenses but their hardware was cheap. Especially when corporations upgraded and there was suddenly 1000 NE2000 cards for $2 each at the local swap meet.

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

  • by jasoneckert on 7/20/24, 2:09 PM

    NetWare proliferated very rapidly during the late 80s and was common on most networks I used into the mid 1990s. Their file server product was stable and easy to configure, and worked very well with nearly every client out there using the fast IPX/SPX protocol.

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

  • by re5i5tor on 7/20/24, 9:15 PM

    Eric Schmidt was running Novell 1997-2001, when things went all the way down the tubes. I was shocked when Google hired him.

  • by linsomniac on 7/20/24, 3:16 PM

    Reading this I was amazed that the cheapskate place I worked ~89-92 shelled out to get us a Netware server, considering the crappy hardware they had us developers working on. But then I just realized that we were probably running on a pirated copy.

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

  • by bell-cot on 7/20/24, 3:56 PM

    Ah, NetWare! Those were the days...though my memories are mostly of the prior (286) version.

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

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

  • by andrewstuart on 7/20/24, 10:48 PM

    Hard to grasp now but Netware was really exciting technology at the time.

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

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

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

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

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

  • by EvanAnderson on 7/20/24, 10:44 PM

    Two Netware memories: FIRE PHASERS[0] and the screen saver on the server that showed processor load as a "snake" (and one snake per processor) with length relative to load.

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

  • by AlbertCory on 7/20/24, 7:02 PM

    3Com, where I was, got suckered by Microsoft into "collaborating" on Lan Manager and NetBIOS. That was called internally "Viet BIOS."

    This led directly to the engineers' slogan:

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

  • by mixmastamyk on 7/20/24, 7:32 PM

    Netware was awesome and I remember it fondly. Was quite productive to use and admin.

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

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

  • by dugmartin on 7/21/24, 11:44 AM

    In the shareware days I made pretty good money for a college student with a graphical Netware login utility called "vgalogin" (great name I know). It put the graphics card in VGA mode and integrated a screensaver and quote of the day along with a login dialog. Its main use was simplifying login batch files since with it you didn't need to detect a bad login in the batch file.

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

  • by accrual on 7/21/24, 12:20 AM

    My experiences with NetWare came about 2 decades after most in this thread, but thought it would be fun to share anyway. My high school used some version of NetWare for all of the XP-based machines the students could access. I specifically recall having login form with a red Novell banner across the top.

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

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

  • by lukeh on 7/20/24, 10:35 PM

  • by sillywalk on 7/20/24, 9:11 PM

    $7,995. Wow. I wonder how much a contemporary Unix license cost.

  • by efitz on 7/20/24, 3:39 PM

    Oh man this brings back bad memories- I had forgotten about the Bindery. I was a CNE (3.X) back in the day.

  • by brightrhino on 7/21/24, 3:39 PM

    I installed a 1000 node netware 386 network for GE in Schenectady at the time. It worked very well, what killed netware was NT had no per seat licenses initially, it was priced per server, unlimited users. Most of my customers only used file/print services. Nobody paid for netware after that. After Novell was fatally weakened, Microsoft introduced per seat licensing, then started aggressively auditing compliance.

  • by hougaard on 7/20/24, 2:19 PM

    What warez dump?

  • by pajko on 7/20/24, 5:15 PM

    https://archive.org/details/Hacker_Chronicles_Volume_1_1994

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

  • by annoyingnoob on 7/20/24, 3:57 PM

    I got my CNA in about '92. Really helped land my first full time job.

  • by 1vuio0pswjnm7 on 7/21/24, 7:58 AM

    Better icons back then than today's software. I remember one that looked like an overhead view of a gecko. I remember around that time UUNet went public.

  • by dura00 on 7/20/24, 5:34 PM

    And lets remember the best feature of NetWare: ncsnipes.

  • by afitnerd on 7/21/24, 2:36 PM

    I set up a local job recruiters network with netware 386 running over arcnet (2 mbps) in 1989.