#DOScember
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- Опубликовано: 7 авг 2024
- In the 80's the PC came to dominate the business computing scene. However the fight was then on to define which standard would become the standard network technology for the PC, would it be Vines, LAN Manger, or Netware.
This video is part of the #doscember effort to get a whole bunch of channels todo DOS themed video.
Others taking part in doscember are:
Adrian's Digital Basement: / adriansdigita. .
ctrl-alt-rees: / ctrlaltrees
DaveJustDave: / mrdavejustdave
Jan Beta: / janbeta
Josh Malone: / joshmalone_48. .
LGR: / lazygamereviews
MindFlareRetro: / mindflareretro
Mr Lurch's Things: / mrlurchsthings
Noel's Retro Lab: / noelsretrolab
Ovesennet:
/ ovesennet
RetroSpector78: / retrospector78
RMC: / rmcretro
RoseTintedSpectrum: / rosetintedspe. .
Tech Tangents: / akbkuku
The 8-Bit Guy: / adric22
TheRetroChannel: / theretrochannel
Re:Enthused / reenthused 
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Aaah the early LAN party. 8 IT people 8-9 computers, 12 network cards. several hours to get 7 -8 computers to talk properly. many hours gaming. Then pulling out any cards that weren't yours, getting your cards back then going home. the good old days.
There was always someone who spent all weekend trying to get their PC to work, connect to the network, or fix some other issue or other, which we referred to as "playing windows". Happy days....
Then being a boss because you had the only Fast ethernet network switch at the whole lan party and everyone drooling over it because they only had 10Mbit half duplex hubs.
Ghetto gamer and proud of it lol
I remember late 90's my friend would bring his moms laptop over and we used a special parallel cable and some windows tool to create a connection and play age of empires 1 and 2. For some reason IPX was the only way we could get it working... I am turning 37 in a few days to set the time frame. Not DOS, but not too long after, if only we knew how easy we had it...
Yeah, once we got switches the "several hours" thing were gone :)... THose were however very expensive in the first years.
Having administered a Novell network in the 90's, this brings back fond memories 😎
Thanks very much 😍
Glad you enjoyed it.
It brings back non - fond memories here. By God I hated it and the windows clients, ugh! :)
As did I. I only threw the books away in 2014.
It drove me to drinking. Thank you, Netware!
Though to be fair coming from MVS/DB2 and this and that, it was well documented and doable.
I remember at the end, they had some pretty cool tricks for deploying windows applications into windows without actually installing them, and a bunch of other fancy tricks. Novell was dominant in my school system and first university for many years. I enjoyed that I convinced some IT guy at the highschool to let me borrow and copy the netware server disks and I had my own Netware server at home for a long time. Best was to alter your login script and add "fire phasors 3 times" - used to really piss off the computer teacher at highschool because they had that on the admin account, so if you added it to your own login script, they thought you had hacked the admin account - ah, those were the days!
I did do limited Novell admin in the 90s.. Basically, a lab of about 50 machines. Where I worked used compartmentalised security, which meant you only got access to administrate the things you needed. It annoyed the hell out of me in the 90s, but I think it's actually better now. If you don't have access to something, you cannot be blamed if it is breached.
We switched NDS (not sure if it was eDirectory at the time, but was the same product). I was an administrator on the objects, ous and folders associated with the lab where I worked. Nothing else. Initially at least, I preferred it to Active Directory. While today, I use Active Directory day in day out (and still administer parts), I still feel that while AD gets a lot right, it gets a lot wrong..
Man! This is a blast from the past. I remember installing version 3 AND version 4 and I remember a package I had for Delphi that let you log on to NetWare from Windows 3.1 without using the super buggy NetWare Windows client. Ah happy days
This video just got recommended to me. I was Novell certified in 1993 and did it basically full time from 1993 to 1998. This is nice nostalgia for me.
My school used just about the entire Novell Netware stack (up to 6.5 SP8) until 2014/2015 when the last of the XP machines were retired. I loved the imaging/deployment utility.
I remember all the way through the 2k's that my school had Windows XP machines that ran Novell Netware. they ran it up until 2014 where they switched to microsoft's built in user account manager.
They really stuck in there with Netware, to be fair I could see how its whole Z.E.N works features could have been extremely useful and provide functionality missing from MS's server offerings.
My school carried it forward to windows 7 and also finally switched in 2014
Thank you for this. In my youth I stood up a NetWare environment at a university campus all by myself... seated the token-ring cards in the PCs, pulled the UTP through the drop ceiling to the offices, punched down the runs with a pair of scissors and a butter knife, and the damned thing actually worked. It was an incredible hack and I can't believe I pulled it off. Now do a video about David Harris (/me genuflects at the mention of his name) and the Mercury Mail Transport System and PegasusMail, please...!
Wow. Token Ring.. I tip my admin hat to you sire.... Cheers
If you didn't have a 3Com 3c509 you had problems
before the 3c509 we happily ran ne2000 clones. But the 3com card was so much faster so it was the new de facto standard.
It increased cpu utilization - yuck
I love these trips down memory lane. You can still talk articulately about, and more impressively, demonstrate technology that I used every day as a software engineer in the 80s and 90s, and have since completely forgotten about. Thanks. Really appreciated.
Ah, you kiddies out there - you just can't know what it was like watching all this stuff evolve. There was something new and better practically every week. The pace of improvement was amazing, and I just love it that I got to be part of it. No one ever knew my name, but I was VP of engineering at a company called BP Microsystems (no relation to the energy company). We made equipment that was used to program devices that went into other equipment. So you probably never had anything of ours, but you probably had a lot of things that had been BUILT in part using our gear. We touched the electronics world pretty darn strongly.
My CNE number was under 100 so when I did my training it was at Novell and it included all their hardware.
I think what really did Novell was Exchange ( or Outlook ). We had plenty of clients running MS Office who wanted to share calendars so one Microsoft server was dropped in, MS would then say why run both environments when our server will do file/print. Spent hours with clients migrating to MS Small Business Server.
Back in the day on DOS Word Perfect ruled the document production side ( now ruled by Word ), Lotus 123 was the Excel and Lotus Freelance was PowerPoint.
None of them really worked well on Windows and it smacks of Microsoft again not making it easy for their competitors.
When I look back and remember how bad Windows 1.0 was and Microsoft LAN Manager ( we called it LAN Damager for a reason )
Bad memories of crawling under trading desks looking for the coax T-piece that was loose ( why do women have to have 3 pairs of shoes under their desk !)
And then IBM bought Lotus and that failed as well
Supporting a small Novell Netware network was my first IT job when I dropped out of Uni.
Imagine if we tried to devote a whole month just to Novell: “Novellmber” ...
I wonder if there are enought YouYuber's up for that one 😅
@@RetroBytesUK Id watch
That would be awesome. I'm sure there's many techies out there who would love to watch something like that.
Or if there's not enough for just Novell cover other classic networking products too?
Netvember? NOSvember?
@@viktor.madarasz Same.
My first IT job was at a company running Netware 4.11 as it's main network and a couple departments running NT 3.51. Ah that takes me back.
Great trip down memory lane!
Got my CNE in the mid-90s
My first trip to the CCIE lab included IPX routing in the scenario…damn, I’m old!!
Just love your retrospectives. Informative and witty. The perfect balance.
Having entered the IT world at the very tail end of Novell this was super interesting. Had always been vaguely aware they got their start as early file/print servers but I really always knew them as that weird thing we needed to install login clients for and associate to users in AD.
Great video - really takes me back. My first company ran our entire dev teams network on RPL-booted OS/2 1.3 (and later 2.0). I HATED those machines with a passion because the Arcnet was continually getting disconnected due to someone in the building tripping over their cable and disconnecting the entire network in the process. After the first year we upgraded to machines with hard drives and our lives got much better.
I don't know how many hard drives I had running the Novell certification test before I installed them into a server. I also, created a SCSI drive that I installed the diskettes on so I could load the program, then run the final authorization floppy to quickly get a Novell server up and running. We sold a lot of Novell in the 90s. This brings back fond memories, that I am glad to forget.
Compsurf on 2.x I assume
As developer who inherited a 50+ node Novell 2.11 across a city when I accepted a new job. I was flabbergasted at the time and effort it took to just add a hard drive to the server and operating system. I had to sit at the server machine and run OSGEN and pray all my 5¼ floppy drives weren't corrupt or gasp! missing...
I was thrilled when 3.0 came out. Upgraded physical machine, server OS and clients over a regular two day weekend.
I have so many wild and wonderful moments from my Novell history to keep me occupied remembering for months....
Oldest I worked with was 2.12c. Also recall installing 2.15 or 2.2 , lots of floppy shuffling and waiting. But the seniors said it was nothing compared to 2.12 and older, lol!
Another trip down memory lane for me. Thanks for the reminder !
Yes, I LAN partied with ipx/spx on Duke Nukem 3D in the mid 90s !
One of the few (only ? ) official IT certificates I've got is a Novell CNA 4.1 , training paid for the company I was working for at the time in IT support.
I guess I should have done a CompSci Uni course when it became clear I wasn't really into using my HNC in Electronics , but I never did !
Loved the video, it took me back I was a netware 3.12 admin for a very large setup.
Thanks for this video, it brings memories of simpler times. One my first projects was writing a NLM to bridge IPX and IP networking - using Watcom C and Novell libraries. I remember clearly how a NLM crashing could kill the server, so NLMs had to be absolutely perfect.
This really dusted off some memories i left to forget! Still, great video!
I was amazed how rusty my practical netware skills where when I started making this video, but a day or two later of fixing the odd problem and it all came rushing back.
Brings back memories. Worked at Excelan on the LANalyzer then Network General on the Sniffer. Ended up at 3Com doing the Novell ODI driver and working with Novell on the ODI spec.
My first experience with network companies was at my high school which had a computer room of RPL booted 386s.
I now work at a large bank in South Africa. I finished a project June 2023 to decommission a NDS server 😮
Thanks for the look back.
I remember setting up Novell networks for clients. It was interesting at the time.
Oh the memories! When I was in college in the late 90s, my university had one of the largest NDS Trees. Part of the reason was they were using it for SSO. Some departments had their own networks and accounts but everything else tied back to a central student and/or employee login. They even had something rigged up with the mainframe.
Needless to say, there were some serious headaches around Client32. I also remember a time when an update in the Netware stack had a bug. For lack of a better description, our entire network DDOS'ed itself for hours.
Wow! Talk about a blast from the past. I can’t believe after all these years I knew what came after LSL. Haha!
LSL
NE2000
IPXODI
VLM
That Toshiba boot sequence gave me a totally unexpected huge wave of nostalgia.
Great content. I worked a lot with Netware back in the mid-90s. One request: the background audio is really distraction when it has lyrics. Maybe I just have trouble focusing, but I’d benefit greatly if the background music was instrumental.
Really enjoyed the video, I had fond memories of Novell NetWare, in one of the early jobs at the start of my career working a college I got to cut my teeth on Novell, first with NetWare 3.12 and then later with NetWare 4. I did install a 2 user trial in the earlier 90s but didn't know what to do with it (also played around with NetWare Lite, that was really handy for playing DOOM over a two LAN network).
I eventually bought a NetWare 4 training CD for about £600 when I turned 18, I thought it was going to be my big break into networking, sadly NT took over around that time and my next job was supporting NT4 and Windows 95 clients for a council. I must admit though, I was a big fan of Windows 2000 and Active Directory when it was released.
I seem to recall a NetWare emulator for Linux, called MARSNWE (funny how I remember the name 23 years later). Seems like it's still a thing, or was a couple of years ago. That's my evening sorted going down the NetWare rabbit hole watching videos about NetWare :-D
I remember marsnwe its worked rather well, it only emulated upto netware 3 as far as I remember. I tried to see if I could get it to build again a few years ago, but there where way too many compile errors and it does not look like its been matained in years so I did not put it any more work trying to get it to build.
@@RetroBytesUK I did find an article about running Marsnwe on a Raspberry Pi, was uploaded last year... ruclips.net/video/MZ2aQs2706A/видео.html
If I didn't have an assignment to write about QoS for my OU degree I'd give it a try 🙂
5:30 I remember that. Was amazing being able to just message anyone on the college network.
Love your videos / documentaries!
I worked all over the UK setting up Netware networks, back in the second half of the 90s. I left when they started switching to NT, thank god.
Linux all the way for me, since 2006.
I used to work in the IT dept for Wakefield College in the 90s. Diskless PCs with Boot ROMs, Doom games when the students were off, entering "Fire Phasers=100000" into the Novell login scripts for the users we didn't like.... Fond memories.
Installed and managed my first Novell LAN in 1987 (Advanced Netware 286 !!)! You've brought back some amazing memories! Thanks!!
PS. Snipes anyone????
thanks for this vid, brings back memories of installing novell servers in schools , and setting up networks. We also used (for smaller schools Lantastic (a per to per network) based on ms windows.
I worked in a computer room in 1992 to 1995 that ran a Novell environment. As you mentioned, the client PCs didn't need bootable hard drives and could boot off the server. All client PCs connected to the server via floppy and the only PCs with hard drives were those in the computer or those used by the software developers. The company ran a custom database application based on the btrieve-32 database engine that was also hosted on its own Novell server. The details of this setup are quite sketchy now for me since all of this took place 30 years ago now, but it was both fascinating and amazing that it all worked the way it did.
During this time, I was sent out for a class in Novell server administration. This helped us as computer operators because we were able to do things without needing to call the support staff day and night unless we had to unless something went totally tits up. Compared to NT and Windows Server, Novell was a lot easier to use in some respects the way it handled user permissions and ownership and to me was closer to VMS which I had used in a previous job.
When I got a desktop install with a beta version of Windows NT 3.1, I quickly realized that Novell was screwed.
Que video maravilhoso ! lembrei de cada momento desde a primeira instalação do Netware 3.11...e quando a tia da limpeza metia a vassoura no cabo coaxial e desconectava ? tinha que sair por baixo das mesas procurando kkk que tempo maravilhoso ! sou grato por ter vivido tudo isso.
when i was in high school, we ran netware 2 on an IBM ps/2 model 80. I used netware after high school (late 90s) for a while too. still have my netware 4.1 supervisors guide on my bookshelf
My first experience with networks. First didn’t work because I didn’t have the terminators… had to go to the city and try to get some. We used it to run a BBS over the network. Worked much better than locally, I think you couldn’t use the write cache when running locally or something like that. Soon, we hooked up that BBS to the internet and then became an early internet provider.
Oh my. I'm reminded of when a university my sister attended in 2002 used NetWare, as I remember she had her Acer Aspire 1400 with new (at the time) Windows XP and it loaded "Novell Client for Windows" instead of the usual "Welcome screen" for systems not linked to a Windows domain or classic Windows 2000 logon prompt for systems that were. I'm sure that university eventually moved on to Windows Server.
I never reallly understood what NetWare was for. Thanks for the lovely video!
That's nice of you to say.
It was such a big deal in the early 90s... and you had to install it from like 20 floppies with bright red stickers on them.
A good addition to this would be IPX over IP solutions that existed for playing IPX games over the internet - me and my friends had red alert working for a while
Don't forget the first network game, Snipes. We had so much fun with it in high school.
Novell had a server platform called SFT-III which allowed you to place the NCP across a cluster of two servers. It mirrored memory, NCP operations, and such. So you have one shared nothing cluster that is fully redundant. this is in the early 90's!
me and a buddy got paid a fortune to be on call for an sft3 system for a few months - it never failed. Bought a new car with the money.
Ahh the memories... old CNE/MCNE and the glory days of early networking... Thank you for the memories...
This was so nostalgic, takes me back to the late 90s
My first ever job (and before I worked in IT) used Novell and I have fond memories of it. I always thought the Novell directory was lightyears ahead of the NT Server model; it had full group policies from what I remember and for managing drive letters seemed to be way ahead. I remember being disappointed when I started working in IT admin and got exposed to NT Server, I had to write login scripts to do still that Novell's client did natively.
I was a Novell CNA 4 back in the early 90s, while I was in college and working part time at a medical billing company. I replaced a small Lantastic coax network with a much larger company-wide Netware 4 network, plus an early Pentium HP server that cost something like $15k or so. I even introduced (well, tried to introduce) internal email to get rid of all the paper memos. But the big benefit for the company was sharing serial connections to MUX'd leased lines that connected to hospital minicomputers and mainframes. Those lines were super expensive, and until that point, could only be used by dedicated dumb terminals in the office, and those had to have serial cables run through the walls and down to the phone/computer room to connect to the leased line MUX. With the shared serial ports, anyone's workstation could then be used to connect to any of the hospitals and would use the existing wiring. I had a bunch of expensive Digiboard cards and boxes that had a couple dozen serial ports, and the sharing all happened over the novell network. We also had a big line printer shared over the network, which was another huge plus.
I had the IPX network set to ID 3263827. :)
Networking was such a mess back then. Get disconnected from the network? Reboot. Didn't start the network software before starting Windows 3 or DOS? Reboot.
Edit: And yes, I was using the Novell network client for Windows (the one that popped up the Novell login window before you got a Windows desktop). It really was a pig.
Novell Netware. Well when we were moving from mins specifically the Atex system (PDP-11). When I worked for Atex I was sent to Bedford MA to get my hardware training at the Kodak Training Center. Atex was owned by Kodak and my checks were from Kodak. But I jumped ship and went to work at the place Atex was installed in. But then we started to move to PC's and Macs. So they sent me to school at the Empire State Building on the 86th floor. It took a lot of classes but I eventually took my last test when I was in Florida visiting my mother in West Palm Beach. I really did think I was going to fail. But I got the best score and passed my test. After that I got my certification as a Network Engineer. Later I went to Wellfleet classes again up in MA. But we ditched Wellfleet and moved to Cisco. I took classes but never got my full Certificate from Cisco. We later outsourced most of it.
But I loved fixing the hard drives on the Atex system. You actually replaced a crashed head from the drum.
Fond memories. We sold Interlan gear at my first company. Made a killing on selling TCP/IP Gateways for Netware on top of all the other gear. It was based on the NP600 *intelligent* 16 bit NIC and cost GBP 3995 as a package.
Other memories include the disc test software that we needed to leave running overnight (can't remember the name) and the regular - and absolutely necessary - network testing that we did on our own network with Snipes. The odd shout of "bastard!!" ringing across the open plan office when one of us managed to leave a bomb for one of the other players confused the rest of the staff a somewhat.
The memories (nightmare at times) of Netware, I even bought the Novell Netware Client software for Amigas. With v4.x the Java UII was so slow even on a dual CPU system, is when I dropped using it and switched to using Unix servers and NASes.
When I was in college I worked at a market research phone bank that was all Novell Netware.
It was pretty robust and able to use relatively low powered hardware for the clients.
To give you an idea of what this looked like, we all had monochrome monitors, and people would fight to get one of the cubicles with an amber or green screen, since those were cooler than the black and white version! The smarter guys and girls figured out the messaging feature. But then someone abused it and they locked us out.
It was on good old BNC ethernet IIRC.
Many years later I'm working at a contract gig for a large institution, and they have Novell Netware and Groupwise!
That was much different. Running on top of Windows clients. It was much more powerful than Active Directory + Exchange. Especially in terms of pushing out software.
The first aircraft carrier I served on used Novell for network connectivity. The desktops we had were DOS and Windows 3.11 for Networks, and we had a thicknet network for the LAN. This was circa 1996. We had a couple of logistics apps we used that both used remote X11 windows to hook up with the unix servers. At the time it all seemed like magic voodoo. In 1998 the whole shebang was replaced with a TBASE10T LAN with new desktops running NT 4.0. The thicknet LAN was left in place.
WOW! I had forgotten X400. The 80s and 90s were the best years of networking. I FEEL SO OLD!!!
Great video on a something easily forgotten about.
Thanks Shadow. The part of computer history when LANs where common but the internet was not is going to seem vanishingly small as time goes on.
I set up a network network using QEMU , 2 dos workstations and 1 non-dedicated 2.11 server. It's possible to relive those memories of syscon and compsurf!
Thanks for the memories.
1986/7 - nsnipses ove the novel network was what kept us in the office after 5.30pm :) I loved it.
When I was in elementary school we used Novell NetWare w/ Windows XP up until around 2007/2008 -- we then switched to Active Directory
I used to help support netware I still have a copy in my drawer of old stuff. We also used have little lan parties after work occasionally.
Its been ages since we have had a LAN party at work, last time it was unreal tournament, tad modern, but the younger staff wantes to join in.
BOY did this take me back, it was a pain in the ass but those were the days!!!
Those lovely diskless workstations. I remember when the computer salesman talked the management into buying these because then the users couldn't install software brought from home and there are no known issues. Two days after the new workstations where installed hard disks where added because everyone saw that running software over a 10MBbit network connection from the server is realy slow even in DOS days. And after one month or so the workstations got disk disk drives because every now and then you had to install things by disk drive.
Schools and universities loved the whole hard diskless RPL boot rom thing due to not having to maintain the software install on several thousand machines, that and the hardware savings. I sse exaclty why after a few months you would have just bought hard drives followed by floppy drives. At least the uni I was at had the good sense to fit floppy drives to ever machine. This mean I could you my Linux boot and root disks to get the machine booted, then use Linux's netware client to mount the remote storage. I could even read my Netware email using Linux which was a god send. I could get booted, read me email and leave before others could get DOS started on a bad day.
At university, this is how they set up the whole network back in 1990. The disk less system worked well. It would assign each computer a “temp” space on the server to hold files and such, which was automatically deleted when the computer reboot. No fun when the computer crashed though
Netware 2.12 CNE... ECNE... CNI... and I have a PAC62 in storage. I think it would probably still boot. These videos are so fun! Thanks
Abend - that triggered a memory. I wrote a song in 1996 called Kludge about a crashing Netware server and at the end of the song, I said abend.
Great Stuff!!
I had a 66% on my NT4 Server MCP test. I wonder if I failed the long file name question for Novell was a contributor to me failing. Also don't forget Microsoft's tool for migrating away from Novell, Visine - It gets the red out.
Visine. Gets the red out in 60 seconds. I still remember that tagline!
It turned out to be a trick question in a way. I recall 'add name space os2 to _volume'_ was the cure for w9x LFN support. Though that might have only been usable via the netware brand client to pass the LFN data?
Listening to this video is giving me a rather odd mix of nostalgia and PTSD symptoms. 😳
A fellow former Netware admin ?
I was a systems operator at a large UK pharmaceuticals wholesaler for 12 years from 1988 to 2000, going from ICL mainframes to client server stuff starting in the early 90's. They weren't very big on training, thou give them their dues they did do some, mainly getting tutors in and doing training on premises. We did training for Windows, it was Win 3.1, which most of us knew back to front anyway, DOS, and most usefully Unix. But by far the longest and most involved was the Novell NetWare training, which we did a week long course, the last day of the training was also coincided with the last time I ever used NetWare, lol. TBF the course was mainly for the network guys, I think they just had a few extra seats so they shoved us in too.
Edit: Yup the place I worked, all the Windows workstations were diskless, the whole computer centre ran all of them from 1 server, I remember being in awe of this server as it had a...1 Terabyte hard drive!!!!
My high school still had two classrooms full of computers running Novell, the diskless variety, still in the late '90s. It was a collection of old, I think 286 class computers, many of which ran monochrome, amber monitors. I wonder where they ended up.
I was a Novell CNE for 7 years back in the 1990's - I had Macs, PCs, VMS all plonked on the same network. Netware - symple. :P We had about 1200 machines on a network that ran on Cisco AGS+ routers. IPX/SPX - worked well. They were rockstars in the 1990's.
I think you're the first perosn to comment who used it with VMS.
@@RetroBytesUK I'm just very old...
I've got an alpha box with VMS installed on that I occasionally play with. I never used it commercially however. Career wise I went more and more down the Linux/Unix path, with less and less windows stuff as time went on.
@@RetroBytesUK All those discs in the vid.... $1$DIA1, 2, etc... :)
My dad was big on Novell, using our computers at home as his test bed. I did so many things to mess with it and he seemed to not appreciate the learning experience.
I thought this was about das Netverking, and thought we'd learn about German obscure networking protocols. The real subject is also very interesting. Thanks for presenting these histories.
Lovely job. I remember Novell!
Hopfully its sufficiently DOS for people, but most my DOS years where spent with DOS and netware, they went hand in hand for me.
Yeah, you could load NLM’s above the line… which was one of the benefits. Wow… this brings back a lot of memories.
Wow, this brings back memories...shudder. Wrote C/C++ applications on top of Netware 3.12 and Btrieve way in the past.
A fascinating overview if Novell's history, thank you!
My memory of NetWare & Win95 is a little different to yours, but i'r was a king time ago now.
I found the Novell driver/program for Win95 to be slow and clunky, and took a lot of memory. The Microsoft one worked well for me. But I also remember getting the Netware admin to load the long filename nlm and having long filenames. Yet my memory is that I was using the Microsoft NetWare client in Win95 ?!
Long time ago tho, so I may have been mistaken
Thanks for interesting vid
I started professional life as a netware guy. Never got my certs the company I went to work for was 90% netware and I learned. When Y2K came around I had to upgrade customers from 3.12. I had machines lost in closets with 4-5 years of uptime. Wish I had pictures but was before phones came with those. I was a groupwise admin too as well as border manager and arcserve as well as a few btrieve databases. For the most part customers used them as a NAS. Just a shared drive letter from the server. Most of them booted from a floppy. Just had to load the driver in himem and IPX/Netx in autoexec and call to the login script on the server that put them into a nice menu. Never saw a dos prompt and could control the users. Probably the last days of the priesthood. Client32 was a beast. Any program that comes with a hail mary uninstaller like mcafee or norton that rips it out when all else failed tells you something. It seems like it died like you said around the windows 2000 days. I remember a lot of it was customers were confused by a box that sat there with only a text screen where this new product looks just like what we run everywhere else we want that one. Everything beyond that including the probably overall wise move to embrace linux was sadly on one hand a little too late and on the other probably too ahead of its time. Linux was not well known outside the datacenter and the decision makers that did thought of it as an obscure hacker os which still persists today. Customers would rather pay Microsoft for a closed product they could at least in theory get support on.
Good old Novell :) Back in the 90's a followed classes to become a system administrator. It was the last 'Novell' class, after that year they started with Windows NT. We had a graduation party and one of our teachers was invited, and someone from my class asked him 'And how is the new class doing?'. Well he was never afraid to say his opinion and answered 'They are plain stupid, they don't know anything about DOS (they dropped that with Novell too) so their work is a total mess' . I guess it wasn't that bad after all that I had a Novell/DOS background when I started with a job in the IT world.
Yeah - I had the almost the same experience. Although it was with a mixed class. We did both Novell and Windows NT. I got my certificates for Novell 3.12 and 4.11 alongside with Windows NT. While the people that concentrated on Windows NT where spectacularly bad with DOS stuff, the people that did both NT and Novell did a LOT better.
Funny thing - The people that concentrated on Windows NT had some problems to get a job, while I got hired on my very first job interview (with a company called RPA). I even did a certification exam for Novell 5.1 (CNA) with good results when working for them. Sadly I never was very active with Novell, because I was stationed at places (governmental and airplane repair facility's) that used a mixed UNIX and Windows environment. I learned a LOT about UNIX and later on Linux though, so it was certainly not bad at all.
I am now retired, but still have some good memories about that time...
@@jclosed2516 before I had a pc, I worked with Amigas, although it wasn't the same as UNIX or Linux it had one thing in common, it was structured and not that messy as Windows. Perhaps not a surprise but for personal use, I switched in the late 90's to Linux :)
@@xXTheoLinuxXx Same here - I use Linux Mint (Cinnamon) as main, but in a dual-boot with Windows only for some games. I have never used an Amiga sadly. My first "computer" was some SN7400 series TTL contraption, followed by a Cosmac Super Elf and after that (because I had connections with a shop in the city of Delft for all my hardware, and they where selling Acorn stuff at a later date) the Acorn Atom, Acorn BBC-B, Acorn Archimedes and finally the Acorn RISC PC. After that I went to the "standard" PC hardware configuration. Good times...
@@jclosed2516 I'm using Linux Mint too :) Acorn? My first computer was the Acorn Electron (I still have it in my personal collection). They sold them at Kwantum and it was a very decent computer for that price back in the day (200 Gulden). Later on I had various computers (MSX 1 and 2, Atari 130XE, C64 and even a Sharp MZ800)/ Later on I buyed an Amiga 500 and Atari 520ST. I replaced the A500 with an A1200. After Commodore went bankrupt I buyed a standard PC.
A long time ago I was sitting in the kitchen of my attic flat late at night. I span a bottle on the table. There where to options on the table 1) Spend £2k on Novell Certified Network Engineer Exams b) Spend £2k on a car and start working for myself. That was 20 years ago and I am still working for myself in IT.
Novell 3 CNAis the only IT certification I ever got. I worked at a company that used SynOptics Lattisnet hubs, ne5210 nics, IPX/SPX, dos 5.0/ windows 3.1. I thought Netware was fun. Netware 4 was pretty good too, and beyond that Novell was never too be seen again.
Wow I’ve got memories of Novell 286 and up… I mostly used to see ArcServe installed on netware servers ( along with a DAT drive) at one point… sometimes the server would ABEND during the overnight backup, and visiting customer sites… I used to have a 386 tower in the back of my car to plug into some networks to install drivers etc. from as the site didn’t have any cdroms or way of connecting media to the office pcs…. Ahh how I remember the wrong IPX network number alerts on the server consoles….
I even Had some experience of Novell’s SFT III ( system fault tolerance 3 ) which required exact hardware matching and specific SFT network cards for the “back channel” otherwise you’d get weird issues with one half dropping out…
Later on remember tcp/ip over IPX stack where you could browse the internet via Netscape over the IPX network and out via a network based dialup modem (Shiva I think).. ahh memories…
Boarderware and IP over IPX was an interesting idea, but was destined never to work out unfortunelty. I also had by fair share of ArcServe related issues to.
This brings back memories of the fall of '96 where I worked the LAN support team for my school's dorm networks. We all had to learn Windows '95 (all coming from a Win 3.11 background) in three days, and were then thrown to the wolves of trying to get about 5,000 students connected and running. I remember many long nights of hand-to-keyboard combat while we wrestled with Client32 and regedit trying to beat the systems into shape. The automated install scripts worked about 25% of the time, if that.
It's hard to imagine all this hassle today, when configuring a new device on a network takes about one minute if you are slow at it, and rarely fails.
Client32 was such a mess to start with, eventually Client32 with all the Zen Desktop stuff was excellent. However win98 had come out by the time is was good, and Novell had lost so much market share.
Thanks for sharing. 😉👌🏻
My first job was a tier 1 service desk operator in 2013 and i remember using Novell ConsoleOne for administrating user accounts resetting passwords and stuff, weirdly nostalgic even if im a lil too young to remember the software in its prime.
I would have liked to have spent some time on 2013 Novell as it would have been nice to see what became of it post Netware 5 and 6. Unfortunately I never did get hold of a license for it.
Oh, I remember playing multiplayer Doom on an IPX network with coaxial cable. Good times!
awesome video
Thanks Viktor
Great memories of using netware at the start of the 90's in college. Yeah booting off the boot rom, how cool was that? Thanks for the video
I built many Novell NetWare 4.11 servers in the late 90s. Can't say I miss it at all. Much preferred NT 4. The most convoluted network I had to set up for a customer had a NetWare 4.11 server, Windows NT 4 Workstation clients running a DOS application. What a mess. Thankfully only one of our customers had GroupWise. No fond memories of that one.
I started working in IT in the early/mid 90's and I just love all your video's, they bring back so many memories. Most of my job in the 90's was working on clients Novell Netware, Lantastic and Unix servers. I also built a little netware 3.11 machine at home because I got given a pile of 280mb drives and I could only plug 4 into my desktop machine so I built a Netware box and used it as F:\ with another 4 plugged in there.
6:34 X.400 mail and X.500 directory services were part of the ISO OSI (“Open Standard Interconnect”) networking stack which was being put together in the 1980s as the “official” international standard for building a world-wide Internet.
In the meantime, a bunch of University-based smartypants had created this thing called “TCP/IP”, which was much less complicated and actually worked. I think they were looked on indulgently by the ISO-OSI people as some kind of quick-and-dirty, interim solution while the big corporate types were building the _real_ Internet ...
One or two parts of ISO-OSI do still survive in some form today. You may have heard of “LDAP”, the “Lightweight Directory Access Protocol”. The fact that “DAP” was the name for the protocol underlying X.500 should give you some idea of the origins of that.
And also the 7-layer OSI networking model was quickly adopted as a common reference for talking about protocol stacks in general. If you say something about “Layer 2”, “Layer 3” or “Layer 7”, most networking professionals will know what you mean.
The OSI really missed the window of opertunity to get most of their protocols adopted did'nt they. The layer names and LDAP are some of the few surviving bit of OSI's efforts. That and Ethernet_II not being the common framing on Ethernet any more.
ISO-OSI was just too complex, and seemed to have too much overhead.
Retired IT professional here…we used to refer to Novell as “No-avail.” LOL
This video brouhaha so many memories…. good and bad. 😀
This was fantastic. Thank you. As someone who was a teenager in the 1990s and into computers, I was aware of Netware, and even used client computers that used it, but didn't know, well, anything about it. By the time I did anything with any networking, It was on Windows 95, quickly followed by 98, and so was TCP/IP based for internet access. Playing some games with my brother on the same network we found we needed IPX, but that was my total knowledge of and interaction with anything Netware, outside of an education setting where all I was supposed to be doing was creating Word documents and Excel spreadsheets and printing... So Netware, while it was something I saw mentioned in the magazines and referred to as the education PCs started up, was a black box to me, as it was to many of my peers I'm sure.
So many poeple must have used netware without even knowing what is was. I used to hear people referring to it as logging into DOS so they could have thier Y dirve. I was lucky we built an Ethernet network in our halls at uni (one was not provided), and we ran all sorts on it including netware, with Dos, Linux, and Sco, and eventually Win95 and NT 3.51 clients. So we all realy got to play with it. It was very handy training for life after uni. I even had a play writing a Netware Loadable module, as Watcom C have supoort for building them.
Who else remembers when Netware was distributed with free malware…😱
Around 1989, we had a server and 4 or 5 clients running the on-air vote tally for an election broadcast, and around 11pm we were getting some really odd behaviour,
Luckily, we could dump the data to ‘floppy’ - there wasn’t too much, and had a backup server built for any contingencies… we needed it !
15 minutes later all good.
Ah, what a great trip down memory lane! I was already the "local" computer nerd and in the business when Novell arrived on the scene. Man, it was slick as it could be and it wasn't long before I went to a "short lived" school to get my novel cert. I was a novell admin for a long time and even into the late 2000's. Even though I was already a windows (ugh) guy also by then. It's funny that I actually became a hot commodity and was sought after by recruiters as Novell guys got hard to find....and the outfits using them even harder. My last novel gig was at the DISD - Dallas independent school district. Funny that my last novell job was also the largest. BIG school district with novell servers at every one and tons at the data center. LOL
Ah good times and the stories to be told. Thank you for the video and very good job too. You laid the time line out and the times, just as I remember and got it all right!! Cheers and good riddance IPX/SPX! :)
I remember we used the program called 'Kali' to run IPX games over our early broadband internet.