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1986 was the year that the total processing power of PC's in use surpassed the total processing power of mainframes in use -- personal computers were not only here to stay, but they were becoming a big part of the American business scene. The personal computer revolution was at hand.
In 1986, thanks to Advanced Netware and Microsoft's MS-Net, personal computers were not only being used in business, they were being wired together. The average size of a PC LAN had grown to twelve, and, thanks to Advanced Netware bridging ("bridging" was the term used by the Novell community of the 80's for what is now called routing by the Internet community), the maximum potential size was now in the hundreds of machines. By comparison, the average network of 1984 was about three in size, and the maximum potential size was between 24 (for S-Net) and 128 (for Arcnet and Ethernet). With Advanced Netware, bridges between networks were possible, so networks of Arcnet and Ethernet could be attached together (and were at Novell), that's how the potential size grew into the hundreds.
Apple Macintosh and IBM PC compatibles were both still hot contenders for the average person's PC dollars. (Windows was not viable yet, so Apple had not yet been driven into just the education and publishing niches.)
Ethernet cards were still comparatively expensive (about $300 each) and Fast Ethernet was not available, so Arcnet was the card of choice for Netware networks. Token Ring was coming (and generating a lot of talk), and there were still a plethora of other hardware networking technologies in use.
Hard disks were using the 5" form factor, and 3 ½ floppies were now becoming standard on PC's.
"Letter quality" Dot matrix printers in many forms were kings of the roost in the printer world, and daisywheels were headed for the typewriter niche, and Epson's market dominance was slipping. HP was having a rough time, but it had introduced the Laserjet line of laser printers. They were proudly announcing there would be good times for them, but at the time the announcement looked like another case of "hope springs eternal."
When you asked a typical Novell employee in 1986 who the competition was, the answer was, "3Com" or "Orchid" or one of the other LAN board makers of that era. When you asked Ray, the answer was, "The minicomputer companies." such as General Automation or General Systems or even DEC, then the 2nd largest computer company after IBM.
To compete with those minicomputer companies Novell products had to talk to their products. The minicomputers held the valuable company information of businesses that Novell wanted to sell LANs to. If PC LANs were to take over market share from minicomputers and their terminals, the PC's had to be able to access the information on the minicomputers. From this realization came the "stack company" concept.
The "stack" in stack company referred to communications protocol stacks. (This was another concept articulated by Craig Burton) A stack is a series of rules, or protocols, that describe how the various network components are going to talk to each other. This communicating task is complex enough that a networking system will be using between four and six protocols that coordinate with each other. Some examples of communications protocols are TCP/IP, IPX and Appletalk.
What Craig Burton meant was that Novell would develop the technology to allow workstations and file servers to talk in these "alien" protocols, and for file servers to support requests for file service given in these alien tongues. When this was accomplished, then Netware LANs could accept minicomputers as just another device on the network, and the minicomputer could accept workstations as just another terminal requesting service. Once that happened, the low cost of LAN networks compared to minicomputer networks would suck the lifeblood out of the minicomputer business.
The evolution of Computer Networking and Protocol Stacks
Computer networking began in the sixties, before there were even minicomputer companies. It was driven by the then-new concepts of timesharing and CRT's. Before timesharing, mainframe computers where batch processors -- you fed them punch cards or a paper tape, and they worked on just one job at a time. But, if a collection of CRT's were going to work with a mainframe computer, a communication network was going to be needed to connect them.
As each mainframe manufacturer got into timesharing and CRT's, they came up with their own proprietary network design, and each was very custom. The most famous and enduring was IBM's 3270 network design. (A trivia point: the 3270 was a "fallout technology" of the Space Race -- IBM was contracted by NASA to equip the Space Program.)
As computer networks were being designed in the US, the European standards organization ISO, was coming up with the OSI Model -- something well known to network aficionados and one of the origins of the term "protocol stack." It was this model that outlined the concept of communications protocol stacks as they are known today.
In the seventies minicomputers were developed. These computers needed to network, too. But in the early seventies some protocols were developed that were non-proprietary, or open. An example was TCP/IP, which was sponsored by a government agency, DARPA, and was available for any computer maker to use. The minicomputer companies used a mix of proprietary protocols, such as DECNET, and open protocols, such as TCP/IP.
As LANs developed in the eighties, they were faced with the same proprietary-or-open networking choices. But by the eighties even more open standards were available.
Ironically, the first Novell LANs did not need a communication protocol stack -- with the S-Net system all the communication was point-to-point between the workstations and the server, and Superset cobbled together their own homebrew communications system. But as soon as plans to support other LAN boards solidified, Netware needed to support a formal communication protocol that could work with many kinds of boards and work in a multi-point environment where many computers would share the same communications line.
Superset investigated several possibilities, including TCP/IP, and selected... their own version! It was based on a protocol developed at Xerox PARC called SPX. The Novell version was called IPX. Unlike the minicomputer companies that preceded them, Novell decided to make IPX an open protocol, and as Novell prospered, IPX prospered.
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The evolution of Open Systems Software
In the world of mainframes in the fifties, the concept of standardizing software was hardly recognized even within a company's own line of products. It was a nice idea, but hardly necessary.
When minicomputers burst on the scene in the 70's, there was some trend towards standardizing, but it was not strong -- each minicomputer company was content to reside behind the walls of it's own "software fortress". And the mainframe companies now had considerable investments in their own software technologies, so they weren't about to open up, either.
When personal computers gained in popularity in the mid-eighties, something different happened: customers demanded that third party software run on their computers. The earliest version of that demand expressed itself at trade shows of the mid-eighties when customers would make the rounds of new computer offering and ask, "Can this run Lotus 123 (the popular spreadsheet package) and Flight Simulator (a game)? These packages were notoriously fussy about how the computer's architecture was set up, so if a computer could run these, it could run most of the PC-based software library available at the time.
In the personal computer arena open systems became a reality rather than lip service.
This customer pressure for open systems was steady, and in some areas produced results. In particular, those areas developing around UNIX, TCP/IP and education environments were developing in open fashions.
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When Craig Burton did a survey of what it was going to take to have PC's "talk" with minicomputer environments, he quickly encountered the "software fortress" concept, and it was clear that minicomputer companies were going to move towards having PC's connect to their networks at a glacial pace. And, when he saw this he saw opportunity.
He saw that PC's could support minicomputer protocols as easily, or more easily, than minicomputers could support PC protocols. He saw that the "Netware everywhere" concept could be extended to communications protocols to the great benefit of Novell.
Early in 1985 Burton started outlining the environments that Novell would be moving to support:
| Workstation environments | Communications Protocols | Server/Disk Environments |
| MSDOS | IPX | MSDOS/Windows |
| Windows | TCP/IP | UNIX |
| Macintosh | SNA/3270 | Macintosh |
| Appletalk |
The goal was to make Netware the "glue" that would join these diverse environments together so that files and data could move between them. Netware was to become a "glue product."
Large scale computer networks were being pioneered in 1986, and CompuServe was one of the pioneers. Novell saw them as valuable for their e-mail system and for their forum system (forerunner of a "blog"). The forum system was an ideal way to handle technical support issues -- one person could ask a question, and dozens to hundreds of interested people could see the answer. This would save dozens to hundreds of phone calls to tech support. Novell's tech support on CompuServe forums was called Netwire.
(Epilog: CompuServe was the "Internet" of the eighties, and could have become The Internet of our day if they had been more aggressive in expanding their presence. Instead they were taken over by H&R Block and run in a very conservative fashion. Instead of leading, they were swept up by The Internet tide, America On Line (AOL) passed them by as they hitched to the rising Internet technical boom, and the Dot Com business boom. But between the mid-eighties and the early nineties, CompuServe was King.)
Some paths not taken: Job Server and Real Time Enough
Not all the possible technology paths of LANs were pursued, and some were pursued in fits and starts. Those that were pursued in fits and starts were often labors of love nourished in the Engineering Department.
One of those was the Job Server concept. The Job Server concept was that of partitioning a big computational task into smaller, more manageable chunks, and then handing those small chunks off to workstations to "crunch". When the workstation finished a chunk it would hand results back, and ask for a new chunk. The server that handed out chunks and arranged finished results was called the Job Server.
During Christmas-New Years vacation of 1986 a bunch of Novell engineers came back into the office to show off a massive demonstration of this Job Server concept. They arranged for one hundred workstations to share the problem of calculating how to display a piece of the Mandelbrot graph. Chaos Theory was the hot science item of 1986, and this Mandelbrot graph was the symbol of it.
The demonstration worked flawlessly, but it was not enough to fire the imaginations of the powers-that-be at Novell, so Job Service was not pursued as a Netware feature.
But that was not the end of the concept. This concept of Job Service has showed up again and again in the networking world. Twelve years after the Novell Christmas demo, one of its most widespread implementations was the CETI-at-home project. In the CETI-at-home project workstations of science volunteers install a CETI-at-home screen saver on their workstations, and while the workstations are not busy, the screen saver program has them analyze chunks of radio signals for signs of intelligent communications. Their results are fed back to the CETI-at-home Job Server. |
The MS-Net marketing plan vs. The Advanced Netware marketing plan
MS-Net, Microsoft's replacement for their first LAN offering, had considerably more success, and it was marketed in a way that was quite different from how Novell handled Netware.
Microsoft's MS-Net was a "core" without drivers. Microsoft would license this core to OEM's, and they would add drivers to match their product line. They could, and would, add embellishments to make "their" version of MS-Net more attractive than other versions of MS-Net.
This marketing approach was quite different from Novell's. It had the following benefits:
It was attractive to those manager who wanted to differentiate their company's products more. These were the people who wanted to set up their versions of the minicomputer "software fortresses". For these people the opportunity to embellish meant an opportunity to "lock-in" customers.
It took much of the effort of developing drivers out of Microsoft and laid it in the manufacturer's lap.
It had some disadvantages as well:
Locking in customers was swimming against the tide of the Open Systems movement that was strong in the PC world at that time.
The quality of the driver software and the embellishments depended on the software skills of the hardware manufacturer, and these were not uniformly good.
Televideo was one of the first companies to sign on with Microsoft's MS-Net program. They were enthusiastic and competent. So competent, in fact, that they were helping Microsoft redesign the core so that the hooks were easier for other companies to work with. In spite of their help, MS-Net remained for many years a touchy product.
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