[4] 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 able to utilize a wide range of network cards.

The directory service, 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.

In 1983 when the first versions of NetWare originated, all other competing products were based on the concept of providing shared direct disk access.

Clients log into a server in order to be allowed to map volumes, and access can be restricted according to the login name.

NT, in particular, offered a sub-set of NetWare's services, but on a system that could also be used on a desktop, and due to the vertical integration there was no need for a third-party client.

NetWare originated from consulting work by SuperSet Software, a group founded by the friends Drew Major, Dale Neibaur, Kyle Powell and later Mark Hurst.

The team was originally assigned to create a CP/M disk sharing system to help network the Motorola 68000-based hardware that Novell sold at the time.

In 1983, the team was privately convinced that CP/M was a doomed platform and instead came up with a successful file-sharing system for the newly introduced IBM-compatible PC.

The original product, NetWare 68 (AKA S-Net), ran on Novell's proprietary 68000-based file server hardware, and used a star network topology.

The combination of a higher 16 MiB RAM limit, 80286 processor feature utilization, and 256 MB NetWare volume size limit (compared to the 32 MB that DOS allowed at that time) allowed the building of reliable, cost-effective server-based local area networks for the first time.

A minimum of 2 MiB is required to start up the operating system; any additional RAM is used for FAT, DET and file caching.

Time slicing is accomplished using the keyboard interrupt, which requires strict compliance with the IBM PC design model, otherwise performance is affected.

This provided the best possible performance, it sacrificed reliability because there was no memory protection, and furthermore NetWare 3.x used a co-operative multitasking model, meaning that an NLM was required to yield to the kernel regularly.

The first tier provided Novell's vendors a package containing a compatibility guideline book, engineering support lines, self-testing tools, and limited marketing resources, the latter including a license to promote products with a logo stating "Yes, it runs with NetWare" – all free of charge and followed at the vendors' discretion.

into a combined event stream that was fed to two identical copies of the system engine through a fast (typically 100 Mbit/s) inter-server link.

Using the existing SFT-II software RAID functionality present in the core, disks could be mirrored between the two machines without special hardware.

Version 4 also introduced a number of useful tools and features, such as transparent compression at file system level and RSA public/private encryption.

Client port redirection occurred via a DOS or Windows driver allowing companies to consolidate modems and analog phone lines.

Compounding this, the NetWare console remained text-based at a time the Windows graphical interface gained widespread acceptance.

Especially new users preferred the Windows graphical interface to learning DOS commands necessary to build and control a NetWare server.

[citation needed] A decision by the management of Novell also took away the ability of independent resellers and engineers to recommend and sell the product.

With the release of NetWare 5 in October 1998 Novell switched its primary NCP interface from the IPX/SPX network protocol to TCP/IP to meet market demand.

New features included: The Cluster Services improved on SFT-III, as NCS did not require specialized hardware or identical server configurations.

[30] The clearest indication of this direction was Novell's controversial decision to release Open Enterprise Server on Linux only, not NetWare.

[31] Meanwhile, many former NetWare customers rejected the confusing mix of licensed software running on an open-source Linux operating system in favor of moving to complete Open Source solutions such as those offered by Red Hat.

It includes NetWare 6.5 SP7, which supports running as a paravirtualized guest inside the Xen hypervisor and new Linux based version using SLES10.

[citation needed] Novell did not adapt their pricing structure to current market conditions, and NetWare sales suffered.

Unlike most competing network operating systems prior to Windows NT, NetWare automatically used all otherwise unused RAM for caching active files, employing delayed write-backs to facilitate re-ordering of disk requests (elevator seeks).

An unexpected shutdown could therefore corrupt data, making an uninterruptible power supply practically a mandatory part of a server installation.