novell

In this case it was Novell hardware back when Novell ran on your PC and there was no such thing as a dedicated Novell server.

The network was all DOS machines where you used a command line tool to manually log in to a Novell server.

This is how I used to get around Novell NetWare in high-school to run compilers and learn programming.

You could ask the same question about companies such as Novell or Sun.

Well, there was Novell NetWare some time before Windows for Workgroups arrived.

All running IPX and the glorious Novell Netware 3.x.

When I got out of college, I went to work for a government contractor for about 3 years doing network administration on a Novell network with cc:Mail.

My understanding is that one of the advantages of Novell Netware was that it enables admins to do things like backups, without possessing the credentials to view the documents they were backing up.

One of the university's Novell servers had been doing the business for years and nobody stopped to wonder where it was - until some bright spark realised an audit of the campus network was well overdue.

There was no security in that system, so I wrote a simple wrapper that looked like the Novell login tool, saved the passwords and then shelled out to the real thing to provide access.

The dominance of a few oauth systems tied to walled-gardens proves that false even moreso; you, mr senior-enterprise-developer might have extremely-specific use cases (CAS tied to legacy Novell supporting IE5, maybe), but the majority of starter apps need self-registration, email, password, maybe cell token or Facebook registration to get started.

I'm probably showing my age here, but in the heyday of Novell there was a phenomenon called the "paper CNE".

Novell sold networking until Windows+AD was good enough (round about the launch of Vista).

It would be interesting to explore whether or not there are any commonalities in terms of what happened to Sun, Novell, Borland, etc.

Novell, the single largest sponsor for Gnome, made an agreement with Microsoft that granted them immunity against patent lawsuits for their clients, but nobody else.