Yes, I’m still cleaning up my LAB (and office). In addition to the Bay Networks surprise “find” which I posted about yesterday, I found this today…

Novell GroupWise Installation Disks

Ahhhh…Novell…my first love (with apologies to my wife Debbie). My very first job was as a NetWare Administrator, managing NetWare 3.12 servers and the related network devices (UB Networks hubs and Bay Networks routers). What a powerful and solid combination of hardware and software. You may have heard stories of NetWare servers with an uptime of years…yes, those stories are true, I can attest to it. Windows NT servers had uptimes of perhaps a week or two…and I can attest to that too. NetWare was light years ahead of Microsoft. In fact, I am not exaggerating when I say that Novell (and NetWare) ENABLED the PC revolution. PC’s and businesses had a central storage to share files and manage printing and backups, and GroupWise gave the users email and calendaring functionality.  And all of this was decades ago!!

So, why is Windows Server everywhere and Novell is history? One word…marketing. Novell marketed their products to us geeks…the people that operated the servers and networks. Microsoft marketed to the suits…the managers and VP’s of IT. So…of those two groups, who controlled the budgets? Yup…it was not us geeks, that’s for sure. Of course, it didn’t help that Novell couldn’t market their way out of a paper bag. But that’s another story.

Summary:  Novell rocked. Their products rocked. Their support rocked. Their people rocked.

And I proudly say that I used to be a Novell CNE.