Liam on Linux

This includes simple knowledge about how to operate computers… which is I think why Linux desktops (e.g. GNOME and Pantheon) just throw stuff out: because their developers don’t know how this stuff works, or why it is that way, so they think it’s unimportant.

Some of these big companies have stuff they’ve forgotten about. They don’t know it’s historically important. They don’t know that it’s not related to any modern product. The version numbering of Windows was intentionally obscure.

Example: NT. First release of NT was, logically, 1.0. But it wasn’t called that. It was called 3.1. Why?

Casual apparent reason: well because mainstream Windows was version 3.1 so it was in parallel.

This is marketing. It’s not actually true.

Real reason: MS had a deal in place with Novell to include some handling of Novell Netware client drive mappings. Novell gave MS a little bit of Novell’s client source code, so that Novell shares looked like other network shares, meaning peer-to-peer file shares in Windows for Workgroups.

(Sound weird? It wasn’t. Parallel example: 16-bit Windows (i.e. 3.x) did not include TCP/IP or any form of dial-up networking stack. Just a terminal emulator for BBS use, no networking over modems. People used a 3rd party tool for this.

But Internet Explorer was supported on Windows 3.1x. So MS had to write its own alll-new dialup PPP stack and bundle it with 16-bit IE. Otherwise you could download the MS browser for the MS OS and it couldn’t connect and that would look very foolish.

The dialup stack only did dialup and could not work over a LAN connection. The LAN connection could not do PPP or SLIP over a serial connection. Totally separate stacks.

Well, the dominant server OS was Netware and again the stack was totally separate, with different drivers, different protocols, everything. So Windows couldn’t make or break Novell drive mappings, and the Novell tools couldn’t make or break MS network connections.

Thus the need for some sharing of intellectual property and code.)

Novell was, very reasonably, super wary of Microsoft. MS has a history of stealing code: DoubleSpace contained stolen STAC code; Video for Windows contained stolen Apple QuickTime code; etc. etc.

The agreement with Novell only covered “Windows 3.1”. That is why the second, finished, working edition of Windows for Workgroups, a big version with massive changes, was called… Windows for Workgroups 3.11.

And that’s why NT was also called 3.1. Because that way it fell under the Novell agreement.

Postscript

A decade ago I wrote about the decline and fall of Netware:
https://www.theregister.com/Print/2013/07/16/netware_4_anniversary/

But I didn't mention another pecularity of the Novell/MS uneasy relationship around the time of the launch of NT.

Novell did not really believe that a new MS OS had a chance. So, although MS kept asking, and provided Novell with betas, Novell did not write a Netware client for NT. 

So MS wrote its own. It reverse-engineered the protocol and embedded its own Netware client into NT. It was initially able to connect to Netware 3 servers, but later gained basic authentication-only support for Netware 4's NDS as well.

Novell backpedalled and hastily wrote a client. If I recall correctly – it's more than 30 years ago now – it shipped after NT 3.1 came out. So it was initally buggy and that meant it could crash the new crash-proof OS.

Meaning that they competed: admins, including me, had a choice. Run the functionally-limited but stable MS client, or the feature-rich Novell client that could destabilise your very expensive high-end workstations?

Worse was to come. Since they'd already reverse-engineered the client, MS implemented a server as well. NT could pretend to be a Netware server, and unmodified Netware client PCs (DOS, Windows 3, Windows for Workgroups, whatever) could connect to an NT box without changing the client. And as that was elaborate and involved a lot of memory optimisation, that helped.

The server emulation wasn't a deal-breaker, but it weakened the Novell position. But failing to write a client for what rapidly became a serious business workstation OS was a critical error and at that extremely risky time for Novell, it contributed to the company's fall.