NetWare

NetWare is a computer network operating system developed by Novell, Inc. It initially used cooperative multitasking to run various services on a personal computer, with network protocols based on the archetypal Xerox Network Systems stack.

The original NetWare product in 1983 supported clients running both CP/M and MS-DOS, ran over a proprietary star network topology and was based on a Novell-built file server using the Motorola 68000 processor. The company soon moved away from building its own hardware, and NetWare became hardware-independent, running on any suitable Intel-based IBM PC compatible system, and a wide range of network cards. From the beginning NetWare implemented a number of features inspired by mainframe and minicomputer systems that were not available in its competitors.

In the early 1990s, Novell introduced separate cheaper networking products, unrelated to classic NetWare. These were NetWare Lite 1.0 (NWL), and later Personal NetWare 1.0 (PNW) in 1993.

In 1993 the main product line took a dramatic turn when Version 4 introduced NetWare Directory Services (NDS), a global directory service broadly similar to Microsoft's Active Directory released seven years later. This, along with a new e-mail system, GroupWise, application configuration suite, ZENworks and security product BorderManager were all targeted at the needs of large enterprises.

By 2000 however, Microsoft was making increasing inroads into Novell's customer base and Novell increasingly looked to a future based on a Linux kernel.

The successor product to NetWare, Open Enterprise Server, was released in March 2005. OES offers all the services previously hosted by NetWare v6.5, and added the choice of delivering those services using either a NetWare v6.5 or SUSE Linux Enterprise Server v9 kernel.