Novell NetWare

Novell Netware is a Computer Network operating system that was in the early 1990s the most popular Operating system dedicated to serving files over a Local area network (hereafter referred to as a LAN).

History

(note for more information see the history section of the Novell article) NetWare came about in answer to a brand new market in Computer networking: file sharing. A centralized NetWare server would be dedicated to sharing files over a LAN to other clients running their own client operating system (clients could be UNIX-based, DOS/Windows based, etc). This centralized model made backups easier, and the server could be made redundant to provide for hardware failure.