19 Facts About Novell NetWare

Novell NetWare soon moved away from building its own hardware, and NetWare became hardware-independent, running on any suitable Intel-based IBM PC compatible system, and able to utilize a wide range of network cards.

In 1991, Novell introduced cheaper peer-to-peer networking products for DOS and Windows, unrelated to their server-centric NetWare.

Novell NetWare evolved from a very simple concept: file sharing instead of disk sharing.

In 1983 when the first versions of Novell NetWare originated, all other competing products were based on the concept of providing shared direct disk access.

Early attempts to compete with Novell NetWare failed, but this changed with the inclusion of improved networking support in Windows for Workgroups, and then the successful Windows NT and Windows 95.

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Novell NetWare originated from consulting work by SuperSet Software, a group founded by the friends Drew Major, Dale Neibaur, Kyle Powell and later Mark Hurst.

Novell servers can be assembled using any brand system with an Intel 80286 CPU, any MFM, RLL, ESDI, or SCSI hard drive and any 8- or 16-bit network adapter for which NetWare drivers are available – and 18 different manufacturer's network cards were supported at launch.

Novell NetWare SFT-III, ahead of its time in several ways, was a mixed success.

Additionally, the Novell NetWare console remained text-based, when the Windows graphical interface gained widespread acceptance.

Decision by the management of Novell NetWare took away the ability of independent resellers and engineers to recommend and sell the product.

In 2003, Novell announced the successor product to NetWare: Open Enterprise Server.

Consequent to Novell's acquisitions of Ximian and the German Linux distributor SuSE, Novell moved away from NetWare and shifted its focus towards Linux.

Meanwhile, many former Novell NetWare customers rejected the confusing mix of licensed software running on an open-source Linux operating system in favor of moving to complete Open Source solutions such as those offered by Red Hat.

Microsoft's more aggressive marketing was aimed directly at non-technical management through major magazines, while Novell NetWare's was through more technical magazines read by IT personnel.

Novell NetWare dominated the network operating system market from the mid-1980s through the mid- to late-1990s due to its extremely high performance relative to other NOS technologies.

Novell NetWare NFS outperformed both 'native' NFS systems and claimed a 2:1 performance advantage over SCO Unix NFS on the same hardware.

Unlike most competing network operating systems prior to Windows NT, Novell NetWare automatically used all otherwise unused RAM for caching active files, employing delayed write-backs to facilitate re-ordering of disk requests.

Novell NetWare was a special purpose operating system, not a timesharing OS.

Processes and services running under the Novell NetWare OS were expected to be cooperative, that is to process a request and return control to the OS in a timely fashion.