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 bein

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.