3 ms·

> My memory of the exact details are a bit fuzzy at this remove (I might be e.g. confounding versions 2 and 3), but its fatal flaw was no memory protection. Y

• hga 16y ago
  Interesting. Wikipedia claims "In 4.x and earlier versions, NetWare did not support preemption, virtual memory, graphical user interfaces, etc. Processes and services running under the NetWare OS were expected to be cooperative, that is to process a request and return control to the OS in a timely fashion. On the down side, this trust of application processes to manage themselves could lead to a misbehaving application bringing down the server." If true, memory protection without preemptive multitasking is still basically unacceptable (just not something you can base a healthy server ecosystem on; we had enough "fun" of that sort with non-preemptive 16 bit Windows client). The article also notes that TCP/IP was a second class citizen at best until Netware 5.x in October 1998, "during a time when NetWare market share dropped precipitously...." In general it notes Netware's kernel had a big speed advantage which became less important as systems steadily became faster (and I suspect its tunable caching became less useful).