And then there is the horrible training videos. Yuck.
3 thoughts on “When you think your job sucks, there is retail”
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Virtually Fun
Fun with Virtualization
And then there is the horrible training videos. Yuck.
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Hi I was wondering if you can get (or set yourself) a public IPX Adress so you can talk from one Netware Server to the other on the other side of the world or will ISPs block IPX?
PS: Is there any SQL Server for Netware 3.12 or SQL Client for it?
what could you do with Netware back in the day besides sharing printers and files?
In this day & age ISP’s will most certainly block IPX. The only realistic thing to do is to tunnel it over IP. I had done this a while ago, although interest quickly faded as nobody seemed all that interested in an IPX network. Which means DEC & IP Telephony users are more hardcore, or that I just have no reach.
On the topic of SQL for Netware, the only DBMS that I ever used in the wild back in the day was Oracle for Netware. It was incredibly unstable. It basically was the tipping point for me in the industry for Windows NT being the ‘mid tier’ application server.
I was working in a mainframe world, where everything revolved around CICS data sets (aka flat text files!) and accessing it over LU6.2 connected COBOL apps was out ‘middle tier’ using SNA Server & MS transaction server. In our department however we went rogue, and actually downloaded the monthly snapshots of the mainframe data, and loaded them into SQL 6.5 on NT 3.51 to parse out and work with something called SAS. The upshoot being the programs could be taken off the mainframe, and made to run on our ‘toy’ NT environment. But the amount we paid in DASD/CPU (disk/processor) was so high on the mainframe that a few months let us buy 1TB worth of 4GB disks and run all the simulations we wanted on our own machines. It was a terrifying time for mainframe people as suddenly us little people could process ‘large datasets’ on PC hardware. No doubt that Netware’s horrible single memory space was most certainly not up to this task.
As always you see so many products stumble into the lead with a strength that as the market pivots becomes their fatal weakness. Novell being regarded as fast and stable was demonstrated to be incredibly ineffective vs’s the NT IO model (which just needed Pentium PRO processors and above), and NT’s protected memory space to safely run 3rd party programs. Novell ran everything in a single memory space. It was a disaster. Developing for Netware at its “best” involved the Netware 4 for OS/2, as you could run both at the same time, however it was insanely unstable, and I can’t imagine anyone even thinking of pitting OS/2 + Netware vs Windows NT. I’m sure many tried, I know I did, but ultimately had to give up as it was a train wreck.