Clients with MS-DOS would run a special program Terminate and Stay Resident (TSR) which allowed them to map a local drive letter to a NetWare volume. With NetWare disk space was shared in the form of NetWare volumes, comparable to DOS volumes. The alternative approach was approved by IBM to Novell in 1984 and this helped to promote the product. In 1983, when he designed the first version of NetWare, all other competing products were based on the concept of providing direct access to shared disks. NetWare evolved from a very simple concept: sharing files rather than discs. The latest version of the NetWare 6.5 Support Pack 7 is identical to OES-NetWare Kernel Support Pack 2. The NetWare system survives even today in many companies, although it has been replaced by the Open Enterprise Server (OES).
The system required a dedicated server or semi-dedicated server, whose hard drive was formatted only for NetWare, and had its strength in software for clients, especially light, stable, and compatible with various platforms.Īmong the many merits of NetWare is that of having introduced the concepts of large-scale information sharing and networking, which have become common for all modern companies and also have contributed to the spread of standard systems network that still survive, such as a card with Ethernet technology. NetWare had great success in the eighties as the first true network operating system compatible with standard IBM compatible PC and MS DOS. NetWare is a network operating system developed by Novell, which allows the networking of computers, be it DOS, Windows, Unix or Mac OS.