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For me the start in networks began with Novel’s Netware, but the new buzz word, networking, had actually started some time before this! A quick view of the Novel site today, May 2004, shows they seem to be now embracing Linux. See the images, from www.novell.com -
A switch to their product page shows quite a long alphabetic list, and I note that NetWare 4.2 to 6.5 are there. We had thoughts of modifying the PEP/STEP UTS Emulation code to run in this ‘special’ network OS, and I wrote some test applications, in ANSI C and Intel assembler, to ensure we could "speak" to our hardware, get character interrupts, etc.
At the time there was considerable debate between using and supporting Netware, running Ethernet, and Microsoft’s LAN Manager, using, I think, IBM Token Ring technology. Whatever the OS, we wanted to run our emulator in what we called a network gateway, and thus have ‘thin clients’, the definition was ‘invented’ later, in each of the workstations connected to the network, whatever they ran ... now, May, 2007, Virtual Network Computing (VNC) is the buzz word, and it works over internet as well ...
In the
Netware 4.2 I saw quick
look, which states, in part,
“… NetWare 4.2 supports clients on multiple platforms
including Windows NT, Windows 95/98, Windows 3.1, UNIX, OS/2, Mac OS, and DOS.
Clients running on different operating systems can share files and computing
resources, and you can manage user profiles and resources across multiple
servers. ...”.
That was exactly the range of clients we wanted to support, excluding of course,
not yet 'invented', like Windows NT/95/98/2000/XP/..., or were not yet ubiquitous ;-))
Wow,
reading more into Novell’s more recent Netware
6.5,
indicates they have truly broken with the proprietary OS mode, and fully
embrace the so called ‘Open Source’ as they move to embrace Linux. Read at the
site -
“…Take advantage of flexible open-source technologies-including Apache,
MySQL, Perl, PHP and Jakarta Tomcat (all included in NetWare 6.5)—without
adversely affecting system availability and network management costs. NetWare
6.5 is open-source ready and ideal for running these popular technologies. By
hosting open source technologies on NetWare 6.5, you …”, etc.
But with each iteration of the popular windows software, more and more network components were included, out of the box, thus Novell has also tried to move with the times … The media moved from BNC Co-axial cables to twisted pairs, then radio, even infrared ... At the moment networks probably has a different meaning to lots of people ...
For me it meant more coding, which I loved. Less and less assembler, more C, and the beginnings of C++. Each OS, each physical server meant code changes, even full re-writes at stages, and all fuelled my love of code ...
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