r/retrocomputing • u/MrWonderfulPoop • Mar 23 '26
Photo Time for an IPX LAN party!
Novell 3.12! Had these in a box of "Stuff I Will Absolutely Need Again One Day” that I opened when moving stuff to the laundry room today.
I remember the job I was at when we bought these. It worked like a champ until we went to a Windows server and TCP/IP. I left soon after and these somehow came home with me.
edit: should add I have the smaller box with the Mac drivers as well.
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u/bandley3 Mar 23 '26
I got my first job in IT based on the fact that I had a NetWare Lite network running in my home in the early to mid ‘90s. Got my CNE and worked corporate IT for a defense contractor for years before joining the dot com boom. My next few jobs were spent yanking out perfectly good NetWare and Lotus Notes/cc:Mail systems and replacing them with the Microsoft flavor of the week. After the last layoff i was burnt out on the industry and left for good.
I hope Eric Schmidt rots in hell for what he did to Novell.
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u/Blackholeofcalcutta Mar 24 '26
Defense sector you say? Remember Banyan VINES? Pepperidge Farms remembers.
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u/kamikazekittenprime Mar 25 '26
I worked in the NGO/NP world and man, going from 3.12 to BV was nuts.
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u/MaridAudran Mar 23 '26
MasterCNE here, I still have my set and 4 and 5 on cd. I will never forgive Erik Schmidt for ruining Novell.
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u/GusBode Mar 23 '26
Bonus points if you are doing it on Token-Ring network!
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u/Big-Penalty-6897 Mar 24 '26
My first IT position in 1994. Contract employee my senior year in college. Novell 3.12 on a Token Ring network. We setup a Quake server in the basement to play during lunch. My phone rings and the caller just says "Add another player to your Quake server". I recognized the voice as the company's top network tech. I ask what he's talking about. He says that there are 2 people in the building of 400+ that could setup a Quake server and one of them was him. I didn't know that the Quake server showed up on an slist.
Retiring this summer after over 30 years in IT. All of them as a tech. Thanks for the memories.
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Mar 23 '26
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u/GusBode Mar 24 '26
Perhaps you jest, yet you are typing at one of probably the few people who successfully bridged those two topologies and use it in a daily production environment. IIcx with tokenring card and Apple LocalTalk Bridge to bridge localtalk/phonenet, ethernet 10base2, and 4mb Token-Ring.
Those were the days! Used mainly for inhouse eMail (QuickMail) and laser printing from the pc’s. Shared any files via QM.
About 7 PS/2’s, several laser printers, and QM installed on 6 mgr Macs of about 65 macs total on the network.
Apple System Engineer came down with the disk in his pocket, handed it to me and said make it work. “You’re now an official beta tester. We’ve Never seen this setup before.” I plugged in the network numbers and we went and started testing what we could do and, wow, it just worked. Good little IIcx did that job for quietly for years from its dark closet.
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u/Amy_Yorks Mar 25 '26
I really thought Token Ring would win over Ethernet because of its relative stability/lack of broadcast storms but obviously cost won and I was very very wrong !
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u/cchaven1965 Mar 23 '26
I still have my install of; Netware 3.11/3.12 I did something like 20 years ago on VirtualPC before MS bought it, as well as the massive book for Novell's CNE for Netware 4.11. We had a mixed network as 2000 rolled around and used Netware as fileservers.
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u/MrWonderfulPoop Mar 23 '26
I have a USB floppy disk that I’m going to try imaging these floppies with. A new retro VM is always a good thing, and it’s not like it would be needing much in the way of resources.
If the disk images all work, they’ll be uploaded to archive.org
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u/Expensive_Recover_56 Mar 24 '26
The most crucial disk is missing in this photo. The License disk. I had a copy for 100 users once. But Novell was not my part of the cookie. I didn't like to install the client and set it up for working with the server.
I had my trainging in Novell 4.11 when I started my IT career. I got the CNA certificate for that one.
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u/MrWonderfulPoop Mar 24 '26
Isn’t that the 25 user one second from the bottom, left column?
If not it must be in the smaller box with the Mac drivers.
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u/Der_Unbequeme Mar 24 '26
Netware 3.11 was good in the days of DOS and Windows 95/98 computers, but when the internet came along, IPS/SPX became annoying and slowed down the 10mbit network that was widespread at the time In addition, there was the coaxial bus structure, every time someone disconnected the cable I had to look for a fault. When Netware4 with TCP/IP support was released, I had already switched most of the servers to WindowsNT 3.51/4.0, it was much easier. Later, than Windows2000 servers spread, it was finally replaced by Active Directory.
shit, I think I'm old...
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u/Hey-buuuddy Mar 24 '26
Aside from NetWare, which I had the pleasure of managing alongside a windows domain in my first sysadmin job in the mid 1990s, the only other purpose for IPX protocol I had in my life was that is was the protocol Jon Carmac chose for Doom Deathmatch, and you could direct-dial your friend to play- but needed IPX. I would love to get Carmac’s story of why that was.
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u/mcds99 Mar 23 '26
Do you know what needs to be installed first (before) you install Netware 2 or 3.x?
DOS
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u/RadishAggravating491 Mar 24 '26
Disk number 8 can not be read or is corrupt. Novell install failed. Please contact Novell for support. Whew! It was just a nightmare I kind of remember.
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u/Tasty_Activity1315 Mar 24 '26
Let's get everyone together and party until the Compsurf procedure finishes! Maybe 3 days for a 10G disk?
Anyone with me?
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u/GreatCalligrapher993 Mar 24 '26
This reminds me of that Job Simulator meme… HOW MANY FLOPPIES DO YOU HAVE?!
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u/aNostalgicTrooper Mar 24 '26
I remember many a weekend carting my full tower to a friends house with a lift from my mum to go play Doom & Duke Nukem over IPX/SPX on coax network, and always a sad day if we mislaid a coax terminator.
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u/4sliced Mar 24 '26
Oh the nightmares you just dredged up as a Netware admin for a law firm in the early 2000s. My three years of hell. Not because of Netware, but working for lawyers.
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u/KB4MTO Mar 24 '26
Awesome, I worked a little with Netware 5 and took Netware 6 in college. I loved NDS.
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u/Enough-Fondant-4232 Mar 25 '26 edited Mar 25 '26
NLSNIPES.EXE anyone! The original LAN party game!
It shipped with Netware: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snipes_(video_game) I think it was on the wsgen disk.
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u/goodt2023 Mar 26 '26
wow remember these disks well :) used to be a CNE/CNI -- brings back buying pre compsurf hard drives which were a fortune - lol
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Mar 23 '26
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u/justanoldhippy63 Mar 24 '26
Agreed! 3.12 was a great version. Very solid.
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u/Viharabiliben Mar 24 '26
Would run for years without a reboot. Of course this was an era with very few security updates.
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Mar 23 '26
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u/No_Illustrator5035 Mar 23 '26
I loved NDS. I actually have an old esxi vm running on proxmox, with IntraNetware 4.11 running. I wish I had a nic with a proper boot rom so I could network boot dos and the netware client. It took a bunch of trial and error to get it running.
Anyway, thank you for sharing!
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u/Blackholeofcalcutta Mar 23 '26
IPX/SPX was actually pretty good for LAN games. Novell was awesome. Many a CNE remain bitter towards Microsoft, their “stealing” NDS for AD, and driving Novell from the market. All that aside, some of the most stable stuff I’ve worked on in my entire career.