2 ms·

I saw a benchmark in a US PC magazine once, around this time, benchmarking and comparing NOSs: OS/2 1.3 Server with 3+Open, Banyan VINES, MS LanManager on OS/2,

I saw a benchmark in a US PC magazine once, around this time, benchmarking and comparing NOSs: OS/2 1.3 Server with 3+Open, Banyan VINES, MS LanManager on OS/2, and so on. Netware's disk/file benchmarks were around 3000% faster than all others. The mag had to print a disclaimer on the disk benchmark graph, saying it wasn't a misprint or anything, but that Netware's score was so high the bars for all the others had disappeared. It loaded FATs into RAM as it booted and they stayed there. (This is why a UPS was so important.) Its disk indexing speeds were from RAM. SSDs speeds, 25 years before mass-market SSDs were available. Only its near-bulletproof stability made this viable, but it was. Clarification: disk caching in RAM was rare back then because RAM was so expensive... and NetWare needed a lot of RAM, with the amount scaling linearly according to disk size. DEC VMS didn't have any kind of disk cache, for instance. It was an expensive 3rd party optional extra. Soon after as CPUs got a bit faster it went the other way: on-the-fly compression of disk, via tools like Stacker, because not only was RAM very expensive, so was disk space.

PopAlongKid 2y ago
>Banyan VINES I worked for a Fortune 200 corporation the rolled out Banyan VINES in the late 1980s. FYI, it was Unix underneath, worked great as far as I recall.
- lproven 2y ago
  Sure, yes. It ran on AT&T System V UNIX. https://wiki.restless.systems/wiki/Banyan_VINES_resurrection https://wiki.restless.systems/wiki/Banyan_VINES_resurrection http://banyan-vines.bamertal.com/ http://banyan-vines.bamertal.com/ This has a history but it gets its facts wrong -- e.g. 7.0 wasn't the last version, it got to v8.5. https://thehistoryofcomputing.net/banyan-vines-and-the-emerging-local-area-network https://thehistoryofcomputing.net/banyan-vines-and-the-emerg... VINES's killer features were that the XNS network protocol allowed a network to be divided up into a network of networks, with routing between nodes. (You couldn't do that on the Microsoft/3Com NetBEUI protocol.) And it had an early network directory, called StreetTalk, with a three level address space: user@group@organisation Most rivals either had user@organisation as the only naming system -- including the Internet itself of course -- or you had to name the specific server: alice@bob.charlie.com That is what Novell NDS in Netware 4 was designed to replicate, in a more scalable fashion. Netware 4 was Novell's attempt to catch up with Banyan's StreeTalk.

PopAlongKid 2y ago

>Banyan VINES I worked for a Fortune 200 corporation the rolled out Banyan VINES in the late 1980s. FYI, it was Unix underneath, worked great as far as I recall.

lproven 2y ago
Sure, yes. It ran on AT&T System V UNIX. https://wiki.restless.systems/wiki/Banyan_VINES_resurrection https://wiki.restless.systems/wiki/Banyan_VINES_resurrection http://banyan-vines.bamertal.com/ http://banyan-vines.bamertal.com/ This has a history but it gets its facts wrong -- e.g. 7.0 wasn't the last version, it got to v8.5. https://thehistoryofcomputing.net/banyan-vines-and-the-emerging-local-area-network https://thehistoryofcomputing.net/banyan-vines-and-the-emerg... VINES's killer features were that the XNS network protocol allowed a network to be divided up into a network of networks, with routing between nodes. (You couldn't do that on the Microsoft/3Com NetBEUI protocol.) And it had an early network directory, called StreetTalk, with a three level address space: user@group@organisation Most rivals either had user@organisation as the only naming system -- including the Internet itself of course -- or you had to name the specific server: alice@bob.charlie.com That is what Novell NDS in Netware 4 was designed to replicate, in a more scalable fashion. Netware 4 was Novell's attempt to catch up with Banyan's StreeTalk.