i also worked in the 90s in a company where we had mixed Netware and NT servers. Netware for file and print as well as the connection between our AS/400 and the printers. NT for database and application servers. Then we went full windows and the fun began. "I deleted a file, can you recover it?" Um, no. Not anymore. Haha. Not until they added the functions into later versions with shadow copy and all that stuff. Was a lean few years there. Also funny where we had a TON of printing issues with our facilities with NT print servers and no issues with those with Netware printing from Citrix. Boiled down to windows trying to render the job three times as it passed through three windows spoilers and Netware was happy just to pass the job along without molesting it. That one extra windows queue was all it took on a slow WAN connection to break the job. Had to turn off the spooler on the clients, kind of defeating the purpose of having one. Oh fun times. But illustrative that it was less that Netware didnt play well with TCP/IP since it did just fine. It was more I think due to sheer might of Microsoft and the 'I can get everything from one vendor and make one call if things break' mindset along with the archaic looking interface for things like the file recovery consoles in Netware where, we'll on Windows NT at the time, you simply didn't have any. But also it all was GUI and you felt anyone could easily administer the servers even if your IT person quit. Of course those old text based consoles also made it very easy to remotely administer which was why they could get away with 1 IT person for 7 offices at the time. Once we went to all NT, we needed 5 people. On Wed, May 23, 2018, 1:32 PM Jason Perkins via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
Interesting idea... The first networking I ever did was with Novell.
-J
On Wed, May 23, 2018 at 12:55 PM, Bill Degnan via vcf-midatlantic < vcf-midatlantic@lists.vintagecomputerfederation.org> wrote:
To my knowledge no one has done an exhibit about Novell / Netware networking at least directly. I envision a simple file sharing network installed on some MS DOS 5-era machines, a simple email system, security features, etc to illustrate the product.
As with VMS, Novell declined in usage when TCP/IP became dominant. Not a lot of people know that Novell helped commercialize SUSE Linux.
There is a good story here, someone with experience with Novell should take it up.
Bill
-- Jason Perkins 313 355 0085