Jack Davis and George Canova founded Novell Data Systems Inc in Orem, Utah in 1980 (though possibly informally in 1979 in Provo) with $2 million (around $7.5 million in 2024) in funding from Safeguard Scientific. Crucially, Safeguard owned a controlling portion of NDSI as part of this funding deal. Canova was the the company’s first president while Davis was in charge of sales and marketing, and Warren Van Dyke Musser (Pete) of Safeguard was chairman. Their first building had previously been a truck dealership, and the company’s mission was to make computers and printers. Their first products were Zilog Z-80 machines with 64K RAM and printers capable of around one hundred sixty characters per second. The company quickly grew to around one hundred twenty employees and created a few products that never went on sale but certainly cost money to design and prototype. From what I’ve been able to find, the only products from NDSI before 1983 were the Nexus microcomputer series and the Image 800 printer series.
Drew Major was born on the 17th of June in 1956 in Los Angeles. He attended BYU and received his Bachelor of Science from the university in 1980. Along with Dale Neibaur and Kyle Powell, he founded SuperSet Software in Provo (essentially, just drive south on State St from Orem, which is south from Salt Lake City on I-15). SuperSet’s primary goal was to further develop and then to market networking technology that the three former classmates had worked on while attending BYU and the Eyring Research Institute. All of these technologies and the gentlemen’s research work had been for ARPANET projects, and most of these technologies were originally derivative works of Xerox’s XNS protocol but over time these became both the IPX (internetwork packet exchange) and SPX (sequenced packet exchange) protocols.
In 1981, Novell was on hard times. They simply didn’t sell much equipment and they’d burned quite a bit of cash. As a general rule, investors like to make returns and they dislike losses. The company needed something to set their machines apart and drive sales. Someone thought it would be good to lean into networking. Accordingly, Novell hired SuperSet as consultants to help them develop that capability. This was an extremely good idea, as not long after, Safeguard sent Jack Messman to determine whether or not Novell was worth saving and serve as the company’s president for a time. He arrived to find Major, Neibaur, and Powell playing a game they’d written called Snipes. Normally, this wouldn’t be a good thing, but in this case, it was a great thing. The three men were on different computers (TRS-80, Commodore PET, Apple II), but they were playing together over a network. Messman reported back: “You know, Pete, they've got something pretty interesting that they can do here with this networking.” According to Musser, it was that single visit that kept Novell alive, but Davis first and then later Canova were fired. Through 1982 the company had no less than six different presidents, and the company was mired in chaos. While there was quite a bit of turn over in leadership, the company also laid off nearly all of its staff reducing head count to just fifteen.
While Canova and Davis got zero credit for it, bringing network expertise into the company allowed the company to demonstrate real network capabilities at the November COMDEX of 1982 and to attract quite a bit of attention. One person in particular who was attracted by this networking capability was Ray Noorda. Messman met him at COMDEX and from what I understand Jack Davis had previously recommended him to Safeguard/Novell as a potential candidate to lead the company. According to Musser, Noorda wasn’t one who was generally excitable, he wasn’t fond of many people, and he was a rather hard man. He was known for being a no-nonsense kind of person who could turn a company around and save it.
On the 25th of January in 1983, Safeguard reincorporated NDSI as just Novell Inc, and in April of that year Ray Noorda became the ninth president and the CEO of the newly renamed and brevity valuing company. Messman became chairman of the board and he represented Safeguard’s interests. Noorda and his remaining fifteen employees promptly set about completely changing the focus of the company. Novell would now focus on software and not hardware, and Noorda made this non-optional as he completely disbanded the hardware division of the company. Importantly, the company also formally acquired SuperSet in 1983, and subsequently, Drew Major became became the Chief Scientist at Novell.
Noorda brought $125000 (roughly $389465 in 2024) of his own money into the company, and he borrowed another $1.3 million (around $4 million in 2024). For this, he gained a personal stake in the company of thirty three percent. He had tied his fortunes to Novell, and he was determined to win. The visionary idea he had was to take Major’s earlier disk and printer sharing network technologies and make it possible to do file sharing instead. Why lock a whole disk if you a person only requires a single file? This was Novell NetWare 1.0 that allowed users of the first true network operating system to access files on a server as if they were local. NetWare had a true dedicated server architecture, a specific and dedicated machine was the server and managed resources and services for clients. In a true stroke of genius, Novell thought about security from day one. Networks were still somewhat new in 1983, and most people hadn’t even begun to consider the security implications of the technology, but NetWare had both user authentication and access controls. Finally, while NetWare was initially IPX/SPX only, it was designed in such a way that it would be adaptable. Whatever the network topology was, NetWare would be there.
The timing of NetWare was truly remarkable. In 1983, hard disks were really just starting to penetrate the market with the PC XT having been released on the 8th of March of that year. NetWare was there for the office that was wealthy enough to own both a hard disk or two and some networking equipment. The first version supported both PC-DOS and CP/M clients. The server hardware, however, was initially required to be a Motorola 68000 (NetWare 68) but this changed very quickly following the release of the XT. NetWare was ported to the Intel 8088/8086 (NetWare 86), and it began to gain support for a very wide variety of expansion cards. These were followed by Advanced NetWare 1.0 in 1985 which allowed for more than one server on any given network. Later that year (or early in 1986), Advanced NetWare 1.2 was released with limited support for the 286 and its various features and improvements.
NetWare 2.0 for the Motorola 68000 was released in December of 1985, for the 8088/8086 in January of 1986, and for the 80286 in December of 1986. NetWare 2.0 for the 286 allowed for protected mode operation, use of 16MB of RAM, better multitasking, larger volume size limits, and RAM disk caches for frequently accessed files. All of this taken together increased performance significantly which made larger networks more feasible. NetWare 2 supported more hardware from its first day on the market, and it supported all major network configurations of the day (ARCNET, Token Ring, Ethernet). What’s more, NetWare 2 also supported Loadable Modules (NLMs). This feature allowed both Novell and third parties to release add-on software with new capabilities such as database servers, backup solutions, anti-virus programs, mail, groupware suites, and much more. Third parties had been making add-on products for NetWare as early as April of 1983, but NetWare Loadable Modules brought standards and an official status to the various services that add-ons enabled.
NetWare 2 for 286 improved on other versions in another way that allowed Novell to position its network solution as an alternative to minicomputers and mainframes: fault tolerance. This included things like read-after-write verification, bad-block remapping done during the course of normal operation, software RAID, transaction tracking (so an incomplete write could be reversed), and support for up to four network cards in concurrent use. A standard license for NetWare was for one hundred clients. From what I can find, most Novell customers at this time bought pre-assembled and purpose built servers when going for that standard license. The cost was then determined based upon the hardware and client count with typical pricing ranging from $4500 to $12000. If one were to purchase NetWare only, the pricing was around $2000 (roughly $5600 in 2024) depending upon precisely which version, client count, and feature set was desired. This price could go up to $4995 (around $14000 in 2024) if a company wished for every feature. For the price conscious, any random 286-based machine could run the server with an introductory price for four concurrent users of $595 (this was referred to as ELS NetWare [ELS stands for Entry Level Solution], cost around $1700 in 2024). This entry level system could later be upgraded to ELS II with support for eight concurrent users at a discounted price, though I haven’t found what that price was as most ads advise purchasers to call the software vendor. With the full NetWare 2 286 release, a dedicated server could serve bootable disk images for clients as long as those clients’ boot ROMs or BIOS had NetWare network boot capabilities, but the ELS versions of NetWare lacked this ability.
In 1987, Novell re-entered the hardware market albeit in a rather modest way. The company felt that a primary issue in driving NetWare adoption was the dearth of affordable network hardware. Their answer, released in February, was the NE1000. This was an 8 bit card based off of the National Semiconductor 8390. The first versions were branded as the E-Net adapter and priced at just $395 (around $1000 in 2024) while many competitors’ products were closer to $600. A 16 bit card, the NE2000, was released in 1988 at a price of $495 (about $1300 in 2024). Both cards were designed using off-the-shelf components and manufactured by Eagle (an arm of Anthem Technologies). Novell’s distributors would actually order and purchase these cards directly from Eagle and not from Novell. Novell simply received a royalty for their design work. The company also permitted other companies to clone their designs. For Novell, more network cards meant a larger potential market for network software, and that was a market in which their influence was very swiftly rising. The NE1000 and NE2000 were wildly successful selling at nearly twenty thousand per month. The cards’ status as a top seller was further cemented in 1989 when the prices were lowered to $295 (about $738 in 2024) for the NE1000 and $345 (around $863 in 2024) for the NE2000.
Having fifty percent of the network operating system market and sizable chunk of the network interface card market wasn’t enough. There were still all of these minicomputers and mainframes out there without Novell’s involvement and I suppose that this fact annoyed Noorda? So, making headlines on the 1st of February in 1987, Novell purchased CXI. CXI specialized in making equipment and software that allowed the integration of IBM PCs and compatibles into networks of IBM mainframes and terminals. This acquisition involved a stock swap valued at around $34 million (around $93 million in 2024) and made CXI a wholly owned subsidiary of Novell. In October of that same year, CXI introduced an IBM PS/2 add-in board that would connect PS/2s to both IBM mainframes and NetWare LANs. The board cost $545 (around $1489 in 2024) and came with software to enable all of the various functionality required.
SoftCraft was started by Doug and Nancy Woodward in 1982 in Austin with Nancy as the company president, and Doug as the VP and lead software developer. Their primary product was called Btrieve, a transactional database program. It was pretty neat. The early versions for PC-DOS ran as a TSR providing an API to the database engine. Later versions featured network access capabilities and multi-user functionality and record locking. This wasn’t a cheap product priced at nearly $1000 (about $3000 in 2024) but applications built using Btrieve’s TSR could be distributed without a royalty. By 1985, SoftCraft’s products were seeing significant use in the finance sector, and more than five thousand developers were building products on their APIs. Novell acquired the company in 1987. Nancy Woodward became the VP and GM of Novell’s presence in Austin while Doug became the VP of Advanced Database Technologies. The first fruit of this was released that same year with Btrieve being present on NetWare 2.15 as a value added process. Expanding their products with mainframes and databases was successful, and Novell closed 1988 with sales passing $347 million (roughly $910 million in 2024) and a market share over fifty percent.
Novell released NetWare 3.0 for the 80386 in 1989. This version was a 32 bit network operating system operating in protected mode, with dynamically loadable/unloadable drivers, a C language API and a library set for NetWare loadable modules, with better support for both Macintosh and UNIX clients, supporting far larger disks, much more memory, and it cached the entire file allocation table in memory greatly which increased performance. NetWare 3.0 did not, however, have preemptive multitasking, and all NLMs ran in ring 0. As a result of these two shortcomings, NetWare 3.0 did little to improve upon NetWare’s reliability which wasn’t bad by the standards of the day, but not exactly amazing either. Performance was simply deemed more important at the time. Yet, while the system itself may not have been more reliable, version 3’s network communications certainly were. Version 3 saw the introduction of the NetWare Core Protocol which was an overhaul of the IPX/SPX implementation that brought uniformity to the way file, print, and other services were handled. With NCP, Novell brought better authentication as well as stronger encryption to the product. This version also saw Novell introduce the NetWare Link Services Protocol which was an improved routing protocol that allowed for more efficient scaling and thus much larger networks. NetWare 3.0 was still configured and administered using text-based utilities and lacked a graphical user interface.
By 1990, if anyone on Earth had a network server in a medium to small office setting, it was almost certainly a Novell server as the company’s products claimed an easy monopoly with somewhere from sixty five to possibly ninety percent of the market and sales of $497.5 million (almost $1.2 billion in 2024). The company had a strong presence in Europe, South America, and Asia, and made a strong push into Japan in 1990/1991. By the end of 1991, half of Novell’s annual revenue was from locations outside of the USA. Corvus had filed for bankruptcy a few years earlier, and Banyan VINES and Artisoft LANtastic were battling for that remaining minority percentage of the market. The company began changing around this same time. Microsoft’s NT was getting a lot of buzz in the tech press, and Novell wanted to be in a position to compete with Microsoft directly.
On the 12th of December in 1991, Novell announced a joint venture with AT&T named Univel, headquartered in San Jose, that aimed to develop the Destiny desktop UNIX operating system. Novell held the controlling share in the venture with fifty five percent, and the bulk of the engineering efforts took place in Sandy, Utah. The basis for this system was UNIX SVR4.2 with the MoOLIT toolkit providing the looks of either OPEN LOOK or MOTIF depending upon the user’s preferences. This system made use of virtual filesystems as a descendent of SVR4, and it allowed support for VxFS or UFS as root, featured both TCP/IP and IPX networking, and it had DOS compatibility via DOS Merge 3 (essentially VDMs) and DR-DOS 6. This system became known as UnixWare upon its release in 1992. From articles of the time period, Novell made the assumption that UnixWare’s desktop release would only ever require NetWare, and their Portable NetWare packages for UNIX became NetWare for UNIX although overhauled for this first party effort. The Advanced Server edition of UnixWare is the release that featured IPX, SPX, and TCP/IP. The other notable difference between the two was that the desktop release only supported two concurrent users while the Advanced Server had no limit. Despite lowering its prices in April of 1993, Univel couldn’t move units. On the 21st of December in 1992, Novell announced its intentions to acquire USL including all of the UNIX copyrights, trademarks, and licensing contracts. This was completed by June of 1993. USL was folded into the Novell UNIX Systems Group and moved to Utah. Shortly after the acquisition, Joel Appelbaum, former Univel President & CEO, and Roel Pieper, former CEO of USL, resigned. UnixWare 1.1 was released in December of 1993.
To compete with Microsoft Windows 3, Novell intended to add rich networking capabilities to a multitasking version of DR-DOS and then use GEM as a graphical environment. Don’t think of this as DOS though. After booting into the 16 bit DR-DOS environment with which many of us are familiar, the system loaded Vladivar, a 32 bit preemptively multitasking, multithreaded, operating system kernel featuring hardware virtualization, scheduling, dynamically loadable device drivers, and namespaces. This software was previously used for isolated virtual DOS machines, but was modified and repurposed to be a more general OS kernel. However, the possibility of legal action from Apple over GEM’s look and feel presented a problem. Accordingly, Novell’s head of marketing, Darrell Miller, reached out to Apple’s CEO, John Sculley, about porting System 7 to the 486. Sculley agreed, and on the 14th of February in 1992, project Star Trek began with a scheduled prototype completion date set for the 31st of October. Yeah… about that… classic MacOS was largely written in Motorola 68k assembly language. The newer Pascal bits were certainly easier to port, but the 68k and the 486 are very different CPUs. Additionally, the Macintosh was heavily reliant on ROMs. This porting effort would be a rather Herculean task. Ultimately, the ROMs were implemented as software that would run on Valdivar, many of the assembly language bits were rewritten in a higher level language, and a functional prototype was indeed delivered but a bit late, the 1st of December. They did overshoot the goal though. The prototype had working QuickDraw GX and QuickTime. Despite delivering the working product, the project was cancelled at Apple when Michael Spindler took over as CEO. Novell then released the updated DOS environment without Apple’s bits and bytes as Novell DOS 7 with TASKMGR providing the multitasking controls and also providing an API for GUIs to leverage within EMM386. Unrelated to our main topic, some of Apple’s code rewriting helped in the transition to PowerPC and the file-based ROMs were later used in the iMac.
To compete with Microsoft’s graphical programming tools, Novell purchased Serius in June of 1993. Serius was a company Novell had worked with in the past, and this acquisition provided them with a graphical programming language, Serius89, that they renamed AppWare, and products built with AppWare became AppWare Loadable Modules for NetWare.
Novell completed the purchase of both WordPerfect Corporation as well as the rights, trademarks, and assets of Quattro Pro (from Borland) on the 24th of June in 1994. These products were combined WordPerfect Corp’s Presentations and GroupWise and the combined product became Novell PerfectOffice 3 in December of 1994.
Through all of this, various NetWare releases were made. NetWare’s primary release had made it to version 4.0 by April. This version brought NetWare Directory Services to the market in direct competition with Microsoft Active Directory. NetWare 4 also introduced filesystem level compression, public/private key encryption, and NetWare Asynchronous Services Interface which allowed the server to share multiple serial devices like modems with clients via port redirection. By this point, clients had been made at some point in time for machines on all available x86 chips, 68k Macintosh, VMS, UNIX, DOS, Windows, and OS/2 and servers were available for UNIX, OS/2, VMS, and of course NetWare as the server OS. Various versions existed for different price points, but the ELS system ended with 2.12, and Novell introduced NetWare Lite in 1991 as its successor. Following the release of version 4, however, the version craziness came to an end so that things like “ELS NetWare Level I v2.12” from March of 1990 would no longer be something that a sales person at Novell would need to elucidate to the bewildered customer who hadn’t expected to need a glossary when he/she really just needed file and printer sharing. Version 4 also brought graphical tooling to NetWare for the first time (for some functions on some platforms).
NetWare 4 was easier to install, operate, and maintain while also being more robust with preemptive multitasking, symmetric multiprocessing, directory services, TCP/IP on all SKUs, web services, and GroupWise (email, calendaring, PIM, instant messaging, document management).
On the 6th of April in 1994, Ray Noorda resigned as CEO of Novell. He had saved the company from the dustbin of history and brought it to amazing heights as the third largest software company on Earth at the time. He remained chairman of the company and placed Robert J. Frankenberg as CEO. Frankenberg had been at HP for twenty five years where his last position saw him leading the personal computer business there. This change in leadership came at a rough time for Novell. The company had spent around $1.5 billion (over $3 billion in 2024) getting its hands on WordPerfect and Quattro Pro, and Novell’s stock price took a hit as did the company’s profits with Novell taking a substantial loss for the year.
By 1995, it became quite obvious that many of the acquisitions Novell had made weren’t great moves. Frankenberg promptly reversed course. Btrieve had already been sold back to its owners, UnixWare and related technologies were sold to SCO, AppWare was sold to Network Multimedia Inc, the PerfectOffice products (except for GroupWise) were sold to Corel, and with the company’s focus back to its core product things went decently well. Revenues for 1995 were strong with $2.041 billion (about $4.1 billion in 2024) in revenue and $338 million (about $688 million in 2024) in profits.
While NetWare continued to ship, the company made tons of money and things generally seemed to be going well, the board pressured Frankenberg to quit. Primarily, revenues were strong over Frankenberg’s two and half years but profits weren’t particularly great (about a fifty percent drop in profits in the company's third quarter), and the board was increasingly worried that Novell was “missing out on the Internet.” The company announced Frankenberg’s resignation on the 29th of August in 1996. John Young of HP took over as interim chairman, and Joseph Marengi became interim company president while he searched for a suitable replacement for Frankenberg. Eric Emerson Schmidt, author of lex, took over the company on the 7th of April in 1997 as Chairman and CEO. Prior to this, he’d been at Bell Labs, PARC, and Sun. The company he took over was decidedly moribund. From 1995 forward, all of NetWare’s major operating system competitors shipped with networking support out of the box. In particular, Noorda’s fears had materialized more strongly than anyone may have thought; Windows NT was good. It provided file and print services on a network, and it could also run applications. Unlike NetWare, NT was exceedingly easy to use and the entire system could be administered graphically. NT was also truly and fully preemptively multitasking, and perhaps most importantly for small businesses… NT was cheaper. NT was better than NetWare in many ways, and NT was cheaper than NetWare. While NetWare had emphasized speed and security above all else, it was a worse product in every other way for many users. In a very short time (start of 1997), NT had taken forty three percent of the network operating system market, and Novell’s NetWare had fallen to just thirty three percent.
Almost immediately, Schmidt laid off somewhere between fifteen and twenty percent of Novell’s workforce, reduced shipments of NetWare as existing retail stocks were high, and dedicated the company to upgrading NetWare. Oddly, the company still chose to build a new headquarters of four hundred twelve thousand square feet for its twelve hundred employees. The company didn’t end up moving into their new offices for a few years, but the construction and costs started in the era of Schmidt’s joining the company.
On the 4th of March in 1997, Novell announced that it had filed two separate lawsuits against LG and Super Resources alleging copyright and trademark infringement. Novell claimed that the two companies had used upgraded serial numbers for NetWare and had then sold them as new products to unwitting end-users. Novell claimed that these end-users were not entitled to the upgrade product as they hadn’t been previous license holders. This was not the first lawsuit of this kind. The company had filed a similar suit against Aqua Systems in 1994, which had been settled in August of 1995.
Later in March of 1997, Netscape and Novell started a joint venture named Novonyx. The idea with Novonyx was to create an enterprise webserver for both intranet and internet use-cases that would work on Novell NetWare. Novell closed 1997 with $1 billion (nearly $2 billion in 2024) in revenue and a $78 million (about $151 million in 2024) loss.
On the 27th of January in 1998, Novonyx was shut down. NetWare 5 was released in October of 1998 and shipped with Netscape’s FastTrack webserver instead. This version of NetWare shifted the default network protocol to TCP/IP, had full GUI support, introduced Novell Storage Services as the default filesystem, added a JVM, introduced Novel Distribution Print Services, added pubkey support to directory services along with DNS and DHCP, added support for SANs, and added clustering support. This release was a success with just over a million copies installed, a higher figure than NetWare’s competition, and returned the company to profitability with nearly $1 billion in revenue and $102 million (about $194 million in 2024) in income.
On the 27th of August in 1998, Novell announced a lawsuit against PMI Industries of San Diego for trademark and copyright infringement for selling upgrades as though they were full products to customers who’d not previously held a NetWare license along with unbundled OEM products.
With Novell’s litigious fervor and the growing preference in the market for Windows NT, many resellers dropped NetWare altogether, recertified their Novell Certified Engineers as Microsoft Certified Professionals, and severed all ties with Novell. Sadly for Novell, 1999 proved to be the year that Windows NT truly won the fight with two million copies sold, roughly double NetWare. Yet, Novell was still profitable with nearly $1.3 billion in revenue and $191 million (around $355 million in 2024) in income.
In 2001 after multiple rounds of layoffs, Novell needed reinvent itself. While Novell had always offered some services in addition to its software, the software was always the clear focus. Shifting to services simply wasn’t something in which the company had any deep expertise, and they were losing money fast, so there wasn’t really time enough to build that expertise internally. The solution was found in Cambridge Technology Partners at which Jack Messman was CEO. He also happened to have a board seat at Novell. The acquisition was announced on the 13th of March in 2001 and it was completed on the 9th of July in 2001. Jack Messman became CEO of the company, while Eric Schmidt remained chairman and chief strategist. On the 11th of July, Messman gave his first address to the unified company stating an intent to “leverage synergies and execute on an innovative go-to-market strategy in order to best deliver on existing market opportunity.” Schmidt had joined the board of Google as chairman in March of 2001, became CEO of Google in August, and he subsequently left Novell behind. After the CTP acquisition, Novell relocated to Cambridge, Massachusetts but the company chose to keep technical development work in Provo, Utah. In October of 2001, Novell released NetWare 6. This release greatly simplified the licensing scheme for NetWare, and it added the ability for remote users to access intranet services. Novell lost $273 million in 2001 (around $478 million in 2024).
As other companies before it, Novell was faced with two unbeatable foes. There was Microsoft on one side and Linux on the other. In response the company did what it had done so well in the past, it made two more acquisitions. In August of 2003, Novell purchased Ximian who made Evolution (an enterprise style email client) and Mono (an opensource .Net implementation). In November of 2003, Novell purchased SuSE.
In August of 2003, the last major release of NetWare was made: version 6.5. This release brought quite a bit of open source software into NetWare with a GNU userland, MySQL database, and PHP while also extending quite a bit of functionality to the web. This final version gave NetWare customers USB storage support, a Java application server, and encrypted volume support. As a sign of Novell’s changing fortunes, however, administrators could synchronize their NetWare directory with either a Windows NT domain or with Active Directory. I imagine that this was the route through which most customers left NetWare altogether.
On the 20th of January in 2004, SCO filed a slander of title lawsuit against Novell in the Utah state court system. SCO’s hope was to have Novell remove all claims to UNIX. That case ended in Novell’s favor on the 9th of June in 2004, and Novell filed a counter suit against SCO on the 29th of July in 2005 with multiple claims. This ended on the 10th of August in 2007 with Novell being named the owner of both UNIX and UnixWare copyrights and with SCO being required to pay Novell its portion of profit from the Sun and Microsoft UNIX licenses. Before any payments could be made, SCO filed for bankruptcy. This move didn’t work out for the Santa Cruz Operation, and they were denied a stay. Appeals and motions were made, but on the 30th of August in 2011, an appeals court affirmed everything in Novell’s favor.
From the time of the SuSE acquisition forward, Novell operated as an enterprise Linux services company, and provided support for legacy NetWare customers. The company laid off quite a bit of staff in 2005, and Messman was fired in 2006 along with Joseph Tibbetts, the CFO.
On the 30th of April in 2011, Attachmate completed their acquisition of Novell. On Monday, the 2nd of May, eight hundred employees were laid off. Attachmate was then purchased by Micro Focus on the 20th of November in 2014 with SuSE being sold to EQT Partners in 2019. Micro Focus was acquired by Opentext in 2023.
I now have readers from many of the companies whose history I cover, and many of you were present for time periods I cover. A few of you are mentioned by name in my articles. All corrections to the record are welcome; feel free to leave a comment.
“This version brought NetWare Directory Services to the market in direct competition with Microsoft Active Directory.” – well, this is true if you have a time machine :) NetWare 4 was released in 1993, some seven years before Active Directory. Indeed, some clever Novell engineers figured out how to use NDS as a backend for the NT Security Accounts Manager (SAM) database, allowing NT domains (which until Active Directory were flat in structure) to take advantage of the hierarchical and distributed nature of NDS. Microsoft wasn’t too pleased with this by all reports.
Clearly, Active Directory won in the end, but whether this is due to engineering brilliance or Microsoft leveraging one monopoly to create another, I’ll leave it to the reader to decide.
Side note: in 2002 I started developing a plug compatible Active Directory replacement, XAD. I was able to leverage open source software such as OpenLDAP, Kerberos, DCE RPC and Samba 3 (for its file service; the domain controller implementation was written from scratch), but it still took me about five years to complete.
XAD was acquired by Novell in 2007, renamed to Domain Services for Windows (DSfW) and, after some herculean efforts on the part of myself and Novell’s engineering team, was integrated with eDirectory (née NDS) and Open Enterprise Server (OES). Most of the Active Directory ‘personality’ lived on top of eDirectory but there was some deep integration in the core, for example to ensure that a user created over the native eDirectory protocols would still be assigned a NT Security Identifier (SID) when in DSfW mode. Recall this was done before Microsoft published any of the protocol documentation so, it involved quite a lot of protocol analysis.
DSfW I think is still part of OES but, Samba 4 will have long eclipsed it in functionality and bug-for-bug compatibility with Active Directory. I’m still proud of what we did and the great team at Novell in Provo and Bangalore. Most of the extensions to MIT Kerberos and DCE RPC were released as open source, which then found their way into Samba and macOS (respectively).