Today, you can run NetWare 3.12 in DOSBox or a VM. The ISOs are out there (abandonware now, essentially). Fire it up, create a user named SUPERVISOR with a blank password (because security was... different), and load INSTALL to partition a virtual drive.
Unlike modern OSes, NetWare’s kernel was a single-threaded, non-preemptive system for its core services. But this was by design. The entire OS was optimized for —small, frequent reads and writes from workstations. Context switching was minimal, leading to phenomenal throughput on modest hardware (e.g., a 33MHz 386 with 8MB of RAM could serve 50+ users).
Today, you can run NetWare 3.12 in DOSBox or a VM. The ISOs are out there (abandonware now, essentially). Fire it up, create a user named SUPERVISOR with a blank password (because security was... different), and load INSTALL to partition a virtual drive.
Unlike modern OSes, NetWare’s kernel was a single-threaded, non-preemptive system for its core services. But this was by design. The entire OS was optimized for —small, frequent reads and writes from workstations. Context switching was minimal, leading to phenomenal throughput on modest hardware (e.g., a 33MHz 386 with 8MB of RAM could serve 50+ users). novell netware 3.12
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