By 1986 the groundwork had been laid for the next couple of years of Novell effort. Novell would become a stack company and Novell would promote Netware Everywhere as both a distribution slogan and as a tool for communicating between PC's, various minicomputer protocols, and Open System software.
It was Novell's success in pursuing these visions that drove it to become 70% of the installed LAN base in the late eighties and early nineties. The late eighties were The Year of the LAN for Novell.