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mccrory | 1 year ago

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.

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nradov|1 year ago

Besides the technical and functional weaknesses of NetWare, Novell also shot themselves in the foot by making the product hard to buy. As an end customer you generally couldn't buy it directly. Instead you had to go through an authorized reseller who would try to upsell you on a bunch of hardware and services. That made some sense in the early days of PC LANs when you had to plug hardware jumpers into network cards to configure interrupts but by the time Windows NT launched it was just stupid. Microsoft made NT easy and hassle free for anyone with money to buy and install, which tremendously accelerated early adoption.

kjellsbells|1 year ago

The advantage of Microsoft being second is that they could watch what VARs were installing and make very sure that NT would work seamlessly with that. It didnt take much for them to realize that, say, the 3Com 3C905 or the NE2000 NIC were far and away the best selling NIC in Netware installations, and that therefore they should make very sure that they Just Worked on NT.

I worked in Token Ring at the time. It was...less fun.

mixmastamyk|1 year ago

NT 3.51 was rock solid, I had it on my desk and it never crashed once during the ~year I ran it. Which was a huge deal for MS in those days. Of course they chose performance over stability in 4.x moving display drivers in to the kernel. Thankfully it didn’t affect servers much since they could be run on vga/svga drivers.

genewitch|1 year ago

i ran NT4 from right before 98 until about a year into win2k's release cycle. I remember it never crashing, i think power outages were the only thing that ruined my uptime during those years. I had XP for a little while after win2k because of directx, but as soon as x64 released i was on that, and then 7 x64. My timeline for windows left me moderately happy with my own experience - but i did a lot of "repair" for 95-vista for friends, family, customers, and businesses.

Windows Millennium Edition, everyone!

Angostura|1 year ago

In addition, from what I vaguely recall, one of the big selling point of NT LAN Manager was the ability to deploy network server applications on the server.

Novell responded with Netware Loadable Modules, but they weren’t as versatile and needed specialised knowledge/tools.

flomo|1 year ago

Yep, Netware ran entirely in Ring 0. In linux terminology it was a kernel with no user space, and NLMs were kernel modules. Very fast for file serving, but any application could crash the system. Stability was largely a result of lots of updates. NT had userspace, protected memory, etc, and a GUI for setting up TCP/IP.

linsomniac|1 year ago

The software I was working on in the late '80s made use of Btrieve, a ISAM database server running on Netware. IIRC there was also a SQL server of some sort that we used with it, mostly for reporting.