6 ms·

Novell wouldn’t, or couldn’t, make Netware use task preemption and memory protection. It’s a startling deficiency that killed its chances of becoming a general

Novell wouldn’t, or couldn’t, make Netware use task preemption and memory protection. It’s a startling deficiency that killed its chances of becoming a general purpose server. Without these things, the Netware server couldn’t be trusted to run independent applications. There were some third party server applications built for Netware, I think maybe CC:mail server and Lotus Notes, but the memory protection and cooperative multitasking meant they didn’t last long. I don’t know if this is true but I heard it was Drew Major who made this call, which IMO killed Netware. The justification I heard at the time was that memory protection was too slow. Better slow than dead. I think Novell just didn’t have the technical chops to do it. Also Microsoft was at the height of its powers as a competition killing machine and nothing that stood in its way survived. It really genuinely looked back then like Microsoft was going to wipe out everything and it would be a Microsoft only future. Novell was no exception along with Lotus and Borland and many others.

jacquesm 4y ago
Desqview had that more or less solved, I wonder why Novell couldn't.
- mike_hearn 4y ago
  Probably compatibility? Protected memory and pre-emptive multitasking were a notoriously difficult transition. Apple never managed it with classic macOS, and scars from the transition are visible all over the Windows API even decades later.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    I can see why Apple couldn't do it, the MMU on the Mac wasn't up to the task but on the PC anything post 386 was more than up for it from a technical perspective. Even the 286 machines could do it very well (QnX was originally built on a 16 bit platform).
    - rwmj 4y ago
      Even the awkward segmentation on 8086 was arguably a form of memory protection. Minix on 8086 was surprisingly robust in practice (obviously not in theory) as a rogue 'near' pointer would usually only corrupt the current program. But on the original topic, yes once you've got a 286+ there's no excuse for your OS not having true memory protection.
    - monocasa 4y ago
      The 68851 was more than up to the task, to say nothing of PowerPC chips.
      - jacquesm 4y ago
        That only really happened from the 68030 onward didn't it? Until the 030 processes needed to be pretty careful not to step on each others address space.
        monocasa 4y ago
        It started with the 68020 which came out with 68851 support in an Apple product in 1987. Despite that Mac continued with only partial process protection up until the release of OSX in the early 2000s. My point is their problem wasn't hardware support, but software compatibility.
        jacquesm 4y ago
        Hm, ok, I wasn't aware that the 020's already had a full MMU on board, thanks for the correction. Probably they made too many assumptions about being able to mess around in other processes address space to enable it by the time they got it.
        icedchai 4y ago
        I think they are incorrect. The original Mac II (68020 machine) didn't ship with a full MMU. It had a socket for the 68851 though, if one wanted to add one. I somehow doubt many people did. The newer Mac II's (IIx onward) were 68030-based, so they would've had MMUs built in. (They also released the Mac LC later on, which was 68020 based and had no socket for an MMU.)
- mrweasel 4y ago
  The topic is briefly touched on in the book: "In search of stupidity". Basically the NetWare kernel wasn't actually developed by Novell, at least not initially, but by a team from a company called Superset. As described you could suggest things to the Superset team, but they wasn't actually someone your could order around, partly because they weren't even employees for many years. This team completely ignore customer demands, and focuses solely on technical improvement that have little real-world tie-in. The book is "In Search of stupidity" by Merrill R. Chapman, this particular topic is covered on page 173-174.
mistrial9 4y ago
> genuinely looked back then like Microsoft was going to wipe out everything except for the thousands of companies, academics and individuals who said NO
- ghaff 4y ago
  There were some exceptions like Sun but the vast majority of the technology industry absolutely saw Wintel as inevitable whether they liked the idea or not. You may think they were wrong--and they were to a large degree--but it was absolutely the prevailing sentiment at the time.
  - mistrial9 4y ago
    with all due respect, please re-think your words.. There are millions of active minds, thousands of companies, multiple world markets.. and you reduce the entire globe to "it was thought to be inevitable" ?! do I have to point out the reductio ad absurdum element to that statement? I was there, others here too..
    - browningstreet 4y ago
      In party conversation parlance, I think the sentiment was common. Microsoft was actually subject to a monopoly decree, they invested in Apple to prop up a competitor, they were eating the lunch of workstations, and we were years away from the "Year of the Linux Desktop". Probably many HNers were part of the other side -- running the workstations, installing Linux, excited about Netscape, but Microsoft felt like a Goliath. That they were eventually humbled, now we live with many Goliaths.
  - TheRealDunkirk 4y ago
    It might have been the prevailing sentiment... of all the Microsoft-subsidized trade rags. I just keep thinking how differently "computing" might have evolved in the mid-to-late 90's if other companies had gotten into a spending war with Microsoft for favorable coverage in the press. It's a tradition that Gates continues to this day with his foundation, and which others seem still yet to learn.
efitz 4y ago
I remember that the beat practice was to reboot your NetWare servers every weekend to work around the leaky NLMs :-)
- dragonsky 4y ago
  I was running a 2.x server. it was a sad day that I had to reboot and break the 359 day uptime... Amazing system, solid as a rock as long as long as you stuck to file sharing and printer management.
nradov 4y ago
Lack of memory protection and pre-emptive multitasking allowed for faster performance of NetWare's core file and printer sharing services. Everything ran close to the metal with minimal OS overhead and few context switches. That was a major selling point back when computers were orders of magnitude slower. But by the time Windows NT launched, even though the file sharing was slower than NetWare it was still good enough for most customers. One of the major SQL database vendors (maybe Sybase?) actually ported their product to NetWare. But no one bought it due to the problems you stated. The NetWare development tools were also terrible. Whereas the early Windows NT development tools were actually pretty good. Unlike with NetWare, NT allowed developers to code on a workstation platform and then deploy on a server platform with an identical API which was a huge factor in getting third-party developers onboard.
- gadders 4y ago
  I think there was also a Lotus Notes server for NLM.
  - mobilio 4y ago
    Also Gupta SQL for NetWare
- LorenPechtel 4y ago
  Yeah, I made some use of SPX/IPX. Talk about a minefield! System data in user space, if your program crashed just ctrl-alt-del (this was back in the DOS era) because the instant that data block got overwritten the system would crash anyway. On the other hand why hasn't anyone implemented a recycle bin like they did? (Your whole drive was your recycle bin.) And the users really loved the feature that said "this drawing is locked by <station name>" that I can see no way to implement under any other system.
calrain 4y ago
I started on Netware 2.x but mostly worked with Netware 3.1x. There was a guy at our office that was extremely proficient with Netware, so much so that if he got physical access to a Netware server, he could press the special 'Admin key sequence' (from memory it was about 4 keys pressed at once on the keyboard) and then he would issue commands to peek into memory and tell you the Admin password. This trick only worked if you had already unlocked the screen console with the Admin account since the server booted, but it showed us very early on how important physical security to even a keyboard was. I do remember a key fight that happened back then with Netware and Microsoft was how Netware gave you a free 2 user license to a server if that server was only running network services, such as maybe a DHCP server. If you wanted to do file sharing, then you had to buy the appropriate user license. Microsoft introduced the ability for a Windows NT server to mount a share locally where the contents of that share was data from a Netware server. This way you could get a free 2 user Netware server license, have the NT server use one of those licenses, and then hundreds of people could access the data without Netware being able to technically block it. I recall (can't find any images on the Internet to back it up) that Microsoft changed the traditional 'hand under a folder' icon for this feature so that if you looked carefully, the hand had it's middle finger extended.
- mjcl 4y ago
  > special 'Admin key sequence' R Shift + L Shift + Alt + Esc would trigger the debugger. I would use that to get the console back after btrieve/pervasive.sql ABENDed to unmount volumes before restarting, otherwise NetWare would spend an hour or two running VREPAIR.
- kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 4y ago
  > showed us very early on how important physical security to even a keyboard was My HS ran Novell in the 90s, and they learned this lesson after one of my friends (and fellow computer nerd) walked up to one of the 3 severs and typed DISABLE LOGIN (IIRC), thus locking out the math, English, and science teachers. He spent the rest of the year disallowed from touching any computer in the school, which was interesting for our programming classes. I recall him making life for the librarians difficult by stopping by the library and making them look things up for him.
geoffdunbar 4y ago
I worked at Oracle from 1993-1996, porting the Oracle database to Netware. > Novell wouldn’t, or couldn’t, make Netware use task preemption and memory protection. I actually remember being shown a pre-release version that had memory protection, at least. I don't recall if pre-emptive multitasking was included. It was a bit hacky; I think there was a kernel but then most of the OS ran in one process anyways, so perhaps it was a partial step. I think the problem was trying to be backwards compatible while shifting to the new memory model. Their development team was probably pretty small compared to something like Windows NT, so they didn't have the luxury of re-writing everything. Looking at WikiPedia it is unclear if this upgrade was part of Netware 5 (released in 1998). Your other comment suggests maybe they killed this functionality. I was working for Microsoft by this point anyways. :-) > There were some third party server applications built for Netware, I think maybe CC:mail server and Lotus Notes, but the memory protection and cooperative multitasking meant they didn’t last long. We did actually have quite a few customers for the Oracle database on Netware. Mostly companies that were already locked into Netware for other reasons. In retrospect it does seem like madness to run an RDBMS on a server with no pre-emption or memory protection. I think the performance was pretty good, though. :-) > Also Microsoft was at the height of its powers as a competition killing machine and nothing that stood in its way survived. It really genuinely looked back then like Microsoft was going to wipe out everything and it would be a Microsoft only future. Novell was no exception along with Lotus and Borland and many others. This 100%. It felt absolutely inevitable that Windows NT was going to completely dominate this space once Microsoft came out with a competitive offering. And we didn't really know that Windows NT was a honest-to-goodness real operating system, instead of something hacked together on top of Windows for Workgroups (and DOS by extension). Of course, no one saw Linux coming at this point.
- AlbertCory 4y ago
  Did we know each other? (Oracle, 1991-98). I wrote two articles about it on my Substack, https://albertcory50.substack.com https://albertcory50.substack.com).
  - geoffdunbar 4y ago
    I don't remember... but it's long enough ago that that doesn't mean anything. Virtually everyone I knew there left the company around 1996 as the raises weren't keeping up with the market. New hires were making more than everyone else.
spamizbad 4y ago
It seems silly today, but back in the 90s there was a pretty vocal (albeit small) contingent of people who didn’t like protected memory because of its performance impact, software compatibility issues, and reluctance to relearn some performance hacks. Not just around Netware but on the MacOS side as well.
- roryirvine 4y ago
  Oh yes - Amiga fans were loudly anti-protected memory, Archimedes / RiscOS users poo-poohed preemptive multi-tasking, and Mac owners claimed that neither was necessary.
- _yb2s 4y ago
  I’m not old enough to remember, but does anyone know if there was ever a vocal anti-OS faction? It would seem logical, since an OS has a lot of overhead vs bare metal apps, and pre task switching OSs don’t offer much that can’t be implemented directly in each program.
  - andrewstuart 4y ago
    No. The biggest issue for the entire industry at the time was the operating system. Everyone knew we needed real operating systems. Everyone was sick of crashing applications stomping on each other. Servers had just started to become a thing in the corporate world and server applications were just arriving. People were very interested in operating systems and where they were headed. There wasn't even the concept of "bare metal" at the time. All DOS applications were bare metal. All Windows applications were cooperative multitasking and crashy. People were hungering for better. Everyone expected that OS/2 was the server operating system that we would all be using. And indeed it probably would have been if Microsoft hadn't killed it. Lots of server applications got ported to OS/2 before Windows killed it stone dead.
    - _yb2s 4y ago
      My question was aimed at much earlier pre-DOS times, wondering if there was resistance to simple non multitasking OSs like DOS vs booting straight into the application. I was around and remember what you are describing. Edit: for example, when I was in elementary school in the early 90s we had a lab of already antique Apple IIs, with no permanent storage or OS. We would just boot directly into programs on a floppy. Some of the programs themselves had simple features to save and open files.
treeman79 4y ago
I don’t fully recall. But I believe passwords for Novell where stored in plaintext. With letters incremented and reversed. So getting admin privileges were crazy easy. All the computer people had admin at my high school. Found out a few years later that lots of grades had been changed for many students. School never caught on.
bcrl 4y ago
I don't think it was the OS that held NetWare back, rather it was the change in the CPU / memory / network / disk bandwidth balance. Back when NetWare was being heavily used in the 1980s and early 1990s, 10Mbps ethernet was faster than accessing the local hard disk. ST506 (aka MFM) HDDs only have 5Mbps of bandwidth, and MS-DOS had no build in caching (until later releases -- maybe 5.x? My memory is fuzzy), but Novell NetWare ran in protected mode and had a real disk cache using all available memory on the server. Once IDE HDDs became popular, the throughput of HDDs quickly began to exceed that of ethernet at the time. Once that happened, there was no benefit to centralizing storage resources on a file server when the local disk was far faster. It also didn't help that Windows NT was difficult to run over a network, but that was just another nail in the coffin.
lproven 4y ago
Article author and submitter here. I think that is a mistaken assumption. You have an effect, and you have a cause, but they are largely unrelated. No, it didn't have preemption, or memory protection, early on, but that didn't matter because it was a file server and basically only a file server. The Netware kernel was by and large a single binary running on a single core because that's all CPUs and PCs had then. It only did one job: reading stuff from data, sending it over the network, accepting stuff back and writing it. It doesn't matter if you don't have memory protection if you only have one task. It doesn't matter if you can't preempt when there is only one thread. When Netware was at its peak, it was the fastest fileserver there was, by quite a big margin, and that's all that mattered, because the apps executed on the client machines, not on the server. I put in lots of Netware boxes and all they ran was Netware itself and nothing else. That's what it was for and what it was good at and all that I ever added anywhere was an on-server backup/restore tool, at the most. Servers were not connected to the internet, and couldn't be, because Netware didn't include or use TCP/IP in the early days. They didn't route anything anywhere. There was nowhere to route it to or from, except other Netware servers on the same LAN. They didn't have the killer feature you cite because there was no use for it. I know that there were email servers -- that's where Pegasus got started. I know some people ran databases on it. I dealt with hundreds of clients from dozens of companies at 4-5 different employers and I never saw a single on-server app of any kind. No email, no databases, nothing. It was a thing but not mainstream. But when Windows NT came along, suddenly here was an OS that could be a stable file/print server and run apps as well. You're saying that the world's best-selling bicycle lost out to motorcycles because it didn't have an engine. When it was the best-selling bicycle, motorcycles didn't exist yet. So it's true but it's not the cause. Motorbikes came along and allowed people to do a lot more stuff but bicycles still sell very well... without their engines. What happened is that at Netware 4.x took over, Internet adoption spread at the same time. Suddenly ordinary small businesses wanted an email server, or a proxy server, and Novell did that -- for a price -- and they wanted it on the same expensive box. And it wasn't very good at that. Then it became a problem, yes. But NT was doing well by then, it was a bit cheaper, client licenses were a bit cheaper, but more importantly, as others point out, NT didn't enforce client limitations whereas Netware did... and Netware was hard, while NT was easy. So NT stole Netware's market out from under it. Around the same time, the poor support for server apps became an issue. As did the difficulty of developing them. Netware 4 let you push server apps out to a protection ring outside the kernel's Ring 0, but it cost performance. It did support some levels of protection but that was not the key thing. NT was cheaper, easier, and while slower, ran server apps with aplomb. Even if Netware had been better at it, that wouldn't have saved it. It would still have been harder, meaning it required more skill of admins and developers... and it would still have been more expensive. So, you're right, it was an issue -- but I think it was not actually a make-it-or-break it issue. NDS made life hard for small businesses, who didn't want it or need it. An enterprise feature foisted onto SMEs. And a new competitor, who was better in ways much more important than the ways it was weaker.

jacquesm 4y ago

Desqview had that more or less solved, I wonder why Novell couldn't.

mike_hearn 4y ago
Probably compatibility? Protected memory and pre-emptive multitasking were a notoriously difficult transition. Apple never managed it with classic macOS, and scars from the transition are visible all over the Windows API even decades later.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  I can see why Apple couldn't do it, the MMU on the Mac wasn't up to the task but on the PC anything post 386 was more than up for it from a technical perspective. Even the 286 machines could do it very well (QnX was originally built on a 16 bit platform).
  - rwmj 4y ago
    Even the awkward segmentation on 8086 was arguably a form of memory protection. Minix on 8086 was surprisingly robust in practice (obviously not in theory) as a rogue 'near' pointer would usually only corrupt the current program. But on the original topic, yes once you've got a 286+ there's no excuse for your OS not having true memory protection.
  - monocasa 4y ago
    The 68851 was more than up to the task, to say nothing of PowerPC chips.
    - jacquesm 4y ago
      That only really happened from the 68030 onward didn't it? Until the 030 processes needed to be pretty careful not to step on each others address space.
      - monocasa 4y ago
        It started with the 68020 which came out with 68851 support in an Apple product in 1987. Despite that Mac continued with only partial process protection up until the release of OSX in the early 2000s. My point is their problem wasn't hardware support, but software compatibility.
        jacquesm 4y ago
        Hm, ok, I wasn't aware that the 020's already had a full MMU on board, thanks for the correction. Probably they made too many assumptions about being able to mess around in other processes address space to enable it by the time they got it.
        icedchai 4y ago
        I think they are incorrect. The original Mac II (68020 machine) didn't ship with a full MMU. It had a socket for the 68851 though, if one wanted to add one. I somehow doubt many people did. The newer Mac II's (IIx onward) were 68030-based, so they would've had MMUs built in. (They also released the Mac LC later on, which was 68020 based and had no socket for an MMU.)
mrweasel 4y ago
The topic is briefly touched on in the book: "In search of stupidity". Basically the NetWare kernel wasn't actually developed by Novell, at least not initially, but by a team from a company called Superset. As described you could suggest things to the Superset team, but they wasn't actually someone your could order around, partly because they weren't even employees for many years. This team completely ignore customer demands, and focuses solely on technical improvement that have little real-world tie-in. The book is "In Search of stupidity" by Merrill R. Chapman, this particular topic is covered on page 173-174.

mistrial9 4y ago

> genuinely looked back then like Microsoft was going to wipe out everything except for the thousands of companies, academics and individuals who said NO

ghaff 4y ago
There were some exceptions like Sun but the vast majority of the technology industry absolutely saw Wintel as inevitable whether they liked the idea or not. You may think they were wrong--and they were to a large degree--but it was absolutely the prevailing sentiment at the time.
- mistrial9 4y ago
  with all due respect, please re-think your words.. There are millions of active minds, thousands of companies, multiple world markets.. and you reduce the entire globe to "it was thought to be inevitable" ?! do I have to point out the reductio ad absurdum element to that statement? I was there, others here too..
  - browningstreet 4y ago
    In party conversation parlance, I think the sentiment was common. Microsoft was actually subject to a monopoly decree, they invested in Apple to prop up a competitor, they were eating the lunch of workstations, and we were years away from the "Year of the Linux Desktop". Probably many HNers were part of the other side -- running the workstations, installing Linux, excited about Netscape, but Microsoft felt like a Goliath. That they were eventually humbled, now we live with many Goliaths.
- TheRealDunkirk 4y ago
  It might have been the prevailing sentiment... of all the Microsoft-subsidized trade rags. I just keep thinking how differently "computing" might have evolved in the mid-to-late 90's if other companies had gotten into a spending war with Microsoft for favorable coverage in the press. It's a tradition that Gates continues to this day with his foundation, and which others seem still yet to learn.

efitz 4y ago

I remember that the beat practice was to reboot your NetWare servers every weekend to work around the leaky NLMs :-)

dragonsky 4y ago
I was running a 2.x server. it was a sad day that I had to reboot and break the 359 day uptime... Amazing system, solid as a rock as long as long as you stuck to file sharing and printer management.

nradov 4y ago

Lack of memory protection and pre-emptive multitasking allowed for faster performance of NetWare's core file and printer sharing services. Everything ran close to the metal with minimal OS overhead and few context switches. That was a major selling point back when computers were orders of magnitude slower. But by the time Windows NT launched, even though the file sharing was slower than NetWare it was still good enough for most customers. One of the major SQL database vendors (maybe Sybase?) actually ported their product to NetWare. But no one bought it due to the problems you stated. The NetWare development tools were also terrible. Whereas the early Windows NT development tools were actually pretty good. Unlike with NetWare, NT allowed developers to code on a workstation platform and then deploy on a server platform with an identical API which was a huge factor in getting third-party developers onboard.

gadders 4y ago
I think there was also a Lotus Notes server for NLM.
- mobilio 4y ago
  Also Gupta SQL for NetWare
LorenPechtel 4y ago
Yeah, I made some use of SPX/IPX. Talk about a minefield! System data in user space, if your program crashed just ctrl-alt-del (this was back in the DOS era) because the instant that data block got overwritten the system would crash anyway. On the other hand why hasn't anyone implemented a recycle bin like they did? (Your whole drive was your recycle bin.) And the users really loved the feature that said "this drawing is locked by <station name>" that I can see no way to implement under any other system.

calrain 4y ago

I started on Netware 2.x but mostly worked with Netware 3.1x. There was a guy at our office that was extremely proficient with Netware, so much so that if he got physical access to a Netware server, he could press the special 'Admin key sequence' (from memory it was about 4 keys pressed at once on the keyboard) and then he would issue commands to peek into memory and tell you the Admin password. This trick only worked if you had already unlocked the screen console with the Admin account since the server booted, but it showed us very early on how important physical security to even a keyboard was. I do remember a key fight that happened back then with Netware and Microsoft was how Netware gave you a free 2 user license to a server if that server was only running network services, such as maybe a DHCP server. If you wanted to do file sharing, then you had to buy the appropriate user license. Microsoft introduced the ability for a Windows NT server to mount a share locally where the contents of that share was data from a Netware server. This way you could get a free 2 user Netware server license, have the NT server use one of those licenses, and then hundreds of people could access the data without Netware being able to technically block it. I recall (can't find any images on the Internet to back it up) that Microsoft changed the traditional 'hand under a folder' icon for this feature so that if you looked carefully, the hand had it's middle finger extended.

mjcl 4y ago
> special 'Admin key sequence' R Shift + L Shift + Alt + Esc would trigger the debugger. I would use that to get the console back after btrieve/pervasive.sql ABENDed to unmount volumes before restarting, otherwise NetWare would spend an hour or two running VREPAIR.
kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 4y ago
> showed us very early on how important physical security to even a keyboard was My HS ran Novell in the 90s, and they learned this lesson after one of my friends (and fellow computer nerd) walked up to one of the 3 severs and typed DISABLE LOGIN (IIRC), thus locking out the math, English, and science teachers. He spent the rest of the year disallowed from touching any computer in the school, which was interesting for our programming classes. I recall him making life for the librarians difficult by stopping by the library and making them look things up for him.

geoffdunbar 4y ago

I worked at Oracle from 1993-1996, porting the Oracle database to Netware. > Novell wouldn’t, or couldn’t, make Netware use task preemption and memory protection. I actually remember being shown a pre-release version that had memory protection, at least. I don't recall if pre-emptive multitasking was included. It was a bit hacky; I think there was a kernel but then most of the OS ran in one process anyways, so perhaps it was a partial step. I think the problem was trying to be backwards compatible while shifting to the new memory model. Their development team was probably pretty small compared to something like Windows NT, so they didn't have the luxury of re-writing everything. Looking at WikiPedia it is unclear if this upgrade was part of Netware 5 (released in 1998). Your other comment suggests maybe they killed this functionality. I was working for Microsoft by this point anyways. :-) > There were some third party server applications built for Netware, I think maybe CC:mail server and Lotus Notes, but the memory protection and cooperative multitasking meant they didn’t last long. We did actually have quite a few customers for the Oracle database on Netware. Mostly companies that were already locked into Netware for other reasons. In retrospect it does seem like madness to run an RDBMS on a server with no pre-emption or memory protection. I think the performance was pretty good, though. :-) > Also Microsoft was at the height of its powers as a competition killing machine and nothing that stood in its way survived. It really genuinely looked back then like Microsoft was going to wipe out everything and it would be a Microsoft only future. Novell was no exception along with Lotus and Borland and many others. This 100%. It felt absolutely inevitable that Windows NT was going to completely dominate this space once Microsoft came out with a competitive offering. And we didn't really know that Windows NT was a honest-to-goodness real operating system, instead of something hacked together on top of Windows for Workgroups (and DOS by extension). Of course, no one saw Linux coming at this point.

AlbertCory 4y ago
Did we know each other? (Oracle, 1991-98). I wrote two articles about it on my Substack, https://albertcory50.substack.com https://albertcory50.substack.com).
- geoffdunbar 4y ago
  I don't remember... but it's long enough ago that that doesn't mean anything. Virtually everyone I knew there left the company around 1996 as the raises weren't keeping up with the market. New hires were making more than everyone else.

spamizbad 4y ago

It seems silly today, but back in the 90s there was a pretty vocal (albeit small) contingent of people who didn’t like protected memory because of its performance impact, software compatibility issues, and reluctance to relearn some performance hacks. Not just around Netware but on the MacOS side as well.

roryirvine 4y ago
Oh yes - Amiga fans were loudly anti-protected memory, Archimedes / RiscOS users poo-poohed preemptive multi-tasking, and Mac owners claimed that neither was necessary.
_yb2s 4y ago
I’m not old enough to remember, but does anyone know if there was ever a vocal anti-OS faction? It would seem logical, since an OS has a lot of overhead vs bare metal apps, and pre task switching OSs don’t offer much that can’t be implemented directly in each program.
- andrewstuart 4y ago
  No. The biggest issue for the entire industry at the time was the operating system. Everyone knew we needed real operating systems. Everyone was sick of crashing applications stomping on each other. Servers had just started to become a thing in the corporate world and server applications were just arriving. People were very interested in operating systems and where they were headed. There wasn't even the concept of "bare metal" at the time. All DOS applications were bare metal. All Windows applications were cooperative multitasking and crashy. People were hungering for better. Everyone expected that OS/2 was the server operating system that we would all be using. And indeed it probably would have been if Microsoft hadn't killed it. Lots of server applications got ported to OS/2 before Windows killed it stone dead.
  - _yb2s 4y ago
    My question was aimed at much earlier pre-DOS times, wondering if there was resistance to simple non multitasking OSs like DOS vs booting straight into the application. I was around and remember what you are describing. Edit: for example, when I was in elementary school in the early 90s we had a lab of already antique Apple IIs, with no permanent storage or OS. We would just boot directly into programs on a floppy. Some of the programs themselves had simple features to save and open files.

treeman79 4y ago

I don’t fully recall. But I believe passwords for Novell where stored in plaintext. With letters incremented and reversed. So getting admin privileges were crazy easy. All the computer people had admin at my high school. Found out a few years later that lots of grades had been changed for many students. School never caught on.

bcrl 4y ago

I don't think it was the OS that held NetWare back, rather it was the change in the CPU / memory / network / disk bandwidth balance. Back when NetWare was being heavily used in the 1980s and early 1990s, 10Mbps ethernet was faster than accessing the local hard disk. ST506 (aka MFM) HDDs only have 5Mbps of bandwidth, and MS-DOS had no build in caching (until later releases -- maybe 5.x? My memory is fuzzy), but Novell NetWare ran in protected mode and had a real disk cache using all available memory on the server. Once IDE HDDs became popular, the throughput of HDDs quickly began to exceed that of ethernet at the time. Once that happened, there was no benefit to centralizing storage resources on a file server when the local disk was far faster. It also didn't help that Windows NT was difficult to run over a network, but that was just another nail in the coffin.

lproven 4y ago

Article author and submitter here. I think that is a mistaken assumption. You have an effect, and you have a cause, but they are largely unrelated. No, it didn't have preemption, or memory protection, early on, but that didn't matter because it was a file server and basically only a file server. The Netware kernel was by and large a single binary running on a single core because that's all CPUs and PCs had then. It only did one job: reading stuff from data, sending it over the network, accepting stuff back and writing it. It doesn't matter if you don't have memory protection if you only have one task. It doesn't matter if you can't preempt when there is only one thread. When Netware was at its peak, it was the fastest fileserver there was, by quite a big margin, and that's all that mattered, because the apps executed on the client machines, not on the server. I put in lots of Netware boxes and all they ran was Netware itself and nothing else. That's what it was for and what it was good at and all that I ever added anywhere was an on-server backup/restore tool, at the most. Servers were not connected to the internet, and couldn't be, because Netware didn't include or use TCP/IP in the early days. They didn't route anything anywhere. There was nowhere to route it to or from, except other Netware servers on the same LAN. They didn't have the killer feature you cite because there was no use for it. I know that there were email servers -- that's where Pegasus got started. I know some people ran databases on it. I dealt with hundreds of clients from dozens of companies at 4-5 different employers and I never saw a single on-server app of any kind. No email, no databases, nothing. It was a thing but not mainstream. But when Windows NT came along, suddenly here was an OS that could be a stable file/print server and run apps as well. You're saying that the world's best-selling bicycle lost out to motorcycles because it didn't have an engine. When it was the best-selling bicycle, motorcycles didn't exist yet. So it's true but it's not the cause. Motorbikes came along and allowed people to do a lot more stuff but bicycles still sell very well... without their engines. What happened is that at Netware 4.x took over, Internet adoption spread at the same time. Suddenly ordinary small businesses wanted an email server, or a proxy server, and Novell did that -- for a price -- and they wanted it on the same expensive box. And it wasn't very good at that. Then it became a problem, yes. But NT was doing well by then, it was a bit cheaper, client licenses were a bit cheaper, but more importantly, as others point out, NT didn't enforce client limitations whereas Netware did... and Netware was hard, while NT was easy. So NT stole Netware's market out from under it. Around the same time, the poor support for server apps became an issue. As did the difficulty of developing them. Netware 4 let you push server apps out to a protection ring outside the kernel's Ring 0, but it cost performance. It did support some levels of protection but that was not the key thing. NT was cheaper, easier, and while slower, ran server apps with aplomb. Even if Netware had been better at it, that wouldn't have saved it. It would still have been harder, meaning it required more skill of admins and developers... and it would still have been more expensive. So, you're right, it was an issue -- but I think it was not actually a make-it-or-break it issue. NDS made life hard for small businesses, who didn't want it or need it. An enterprise feature foisted onto SMEs. And a new competitor, who was better in ways much more important than the ways it was weaker.