nobody asked…

[URGENT UPDATE: Dr. Weevil made a comment over at CGHill's dustbury site (Thank you CG for the memorial link...) that he believes September, 1997, was 10-1/2 years ago and not the 11-1/2 years I mentioned below. I gently reminded the good Doctor that he had obviously not taken three things into account:

1. Y2K
2. Daylight Savings Time
3. Here, we count using the admittedly controversial Tennessee rules.

However, in keeping with my Southern Gentlemanness, I acknowledge Dr. Weevil's eagle eye and promise not to try improving upon future calculations...]

[Hum to the tune of Simon & Garfunkle's Sound of Silence ... "Hello darkness, my old friend..."]

Have you ever had a wart or mole removed? One that had been with you for many years? One that was as familiar as it was ugly? A couple of weeks ago I had such a bittersweet experience when shutting down the last of the Novell Netware Servers that we built, sold, and supported.

When I got into the business in the mid-eighties, Netware was all the rage for small as well as big businesses. At first it was Netware 2.xx through a couple of iterations. Then came Netware 3.xx, with the almost usable 3.22 being a soft landing spot. But before we could get too cozy with that, Novell in their stupidity wisdom delivered the 4 series, partially in response to a pesky upstart in the network server business, Microsoft, who dominated the desktop, where Novell did not compete. But now, that arrogant Redmond, Washington, gang had the audacity to challenge the arrogant Provo, Utah, group with something called Windows NT Server 3.51, aimed squarely at eating Novell’s Netware lunch in the small and medium business market. 3.51 was about as big a dog as the current day Vista, but it rattled a lot of cages and paved the way for Windows NT Server 4, which ran Novell’s Netware out of town on a rail.

The Netware Server pictured here was IntraNetware 4.11 for Small Business, running on a box built by my little company. Except for shutdowns every 2 to 3 years for replacement of batteries in the UPS (battery backup), this system has stood there spinning, serving up files and managing network printing since September 15, 1997! That is 11-1/2 years, friends! They just don’t make ‘em the way we used to!

Netware was clumsy, cryptic, difficult, ornery, and unforgiving. And stable as a friggin’ boulder. This little single purpose network, with server as described, and three MS-DOS 6.22 workstations, was about as solid and trouble-free as a network can be. There was not a mouse in sight and no internet connection. There was no way for viruses to get in and no need for routine patches and fixes. Life was simple. Life was good. Enter Microsoft…

[All photos can be dimensionally exploded with a single click.]

For the terminally curious, the server box was built around an Intel Server Board with a genuine Intel Pentium 166 MHz Processor, a whopping 32 MB of RAM, and a 1.2 GB Seagate IDE Hard Drive, housed in a heavy-duty server grade enclosure with 200 Power Supply. Network was 10BaseT Ethernet, all 3Com gear. And with that pitifully low horsepower, which would not be enough to display Windows’ opening splash screen, this server ran like a scared rabbit…