[freeopinion]

Netware existed and thrived before NT LAN Manager. NT LAN Manager seemed like the one MS product that couldn't make inroads against established competition. It simply wasn't as good as Netware.

The way I remember it NLMs were pretty stable. Anything on Windows was not stable, userspace or otherwise. Netware's TUI was just as good as NT's GUI for what it needed to do. It wasn't a liability. Netware's superior directory service was more important.

Netware's demise was the transition from IPX to TCIP/IP and the explosion of the WWW. And from my perspective it wasn't really NT that knocked Netware down. It was Linux and Solaris. Novell kinda saw that coming and tried to figure out a future with SuSE. They just never got the combination of their directory server with Linux right in time. Microsoft stumbled around for some years, but they got their directory services figured out before Novell got their OS story straight in the new world.

[flomo]

Windows NT Server pretty much stomped Netware, so you seem very confused. Are you thinking of OS/2 LAN Manager?

NetWare was stable running vanilla file/print services (just don't load the AppleTalk module!), not so good with database services and so on.

[lproven]

LAN Manager is a whole family of programs. Don't confused LanMan the family with the one implementation in NT -- LanMan is quite a bit older than WinNT.

LanMan is an opened-up version of 3Com's proprietary DOS-based server OS, 3+Share. I installed many 3+Share boxes in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LAN_Manager

3+Share used NetBEUI but LanMan was protocol-neutral, which was rare and exceptional back then. E.g. AppleShare only ran over AppleTalk, Netware only ran over IPX/SPX, and Unix spoke unto Unix -- and nothing but Unix -- over TCP/IP. (Addons to run TCP/IP on other OSes existed but most of them cost money. Often more money than the OS itself, in the case of DOS. And many had proprietary APIs: so for example Quarterdeck DESQview/X used TCP/IP but it couldn't talk to the free TCP/IP stacks Microsoft and IBM eventually distributed. (Two different TCP/IP stacks, natch.)

LanMan ran on OS/2 1.x, on various proprietary Unixes, and on DEC VMS, which DEC marketed as part of its PATHWORKS suite: file/print serving via LanMan, plus Email, terminal emulation, X11 servers for DOS and Windows... all over the DecNet protocol.

[flomo]

Of course, I think the guy I responded to edited his post.

[lproven]

Agreed. ;-)

[mjcl]

> The way I remember it NLMs were pretty stable.

I think this depends on what NLMs you were running. An old job had a NetWare 3.12 server running btrieve/pervasive and it ABENDed enough that I learned how to use the debugger to get the console back and dismount volumes to avoid triggering VREPAIR on restart.