| I worked at Oracle from 1993-1996, porting the Oracle database to Netware. > Novell wouldn’t, or couldn’t, make Netware use task preemption and memory protection. I actually remember being shown a pre-release version that had memory protection, at least. I don't recall if pre-emptive multitasking was included. It was a bit hacky; I think there was a kernel but then most of the OS ran in one process anyways, so perhaps it was a partial step. I think the problem was trying to be backwards compatible while shifting to the new memory model. Their development team was probably pretty small compared to something like Windows NT, so they didn't have the luxury of re-writing everything. Looking at WikiPedia it is unclear if this upgrade was part of Netware 5 (released in 1998). Your other comment suggests maybe they killed this functionality. I was working for Microsoft by this point anyways. :-) > There were some third party server applications built for Netware, I think maybe CC:mail server and Lotus Notes, but the memory protection and cooperative multitasking meant they didn’t last long. We did actually have quite a few customers for the Oracle database on Netware. Mostly companies that were already locked into Netware for other reasons. In retrospect it does seem like madness to run an RDBMS on a server with no pre-emption or memory protection. I think the performance was pretty good, though. :-) > Also Microsoft was at the height of its powers as a competition killing machine and nothing that stood in its way survived. It really genuinely looked back then like Microsoft was going to wipe out everything and it would be a Microsoft only future. Novell was no exception along with Lotus and Borland and many others. This 100%. It felt absolutely inevitable that Windows NT was going to completely dominate this space once Microsoft came out with a competitive offering. And we didn't really know that Windows NT was a honest-to-goodness real operating system, instead of something hacked together on top of Windows for Workgroups (and DOS by extension). Of course, no one saw Linux coming at this point. |