Stephen Foskett, Pack Rat - Latest Comments in Storage History: The 3Server

Re: Storage History: The 3Server

Howard Marks — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 15:35:36 -0000

Actually the 3Server with 3+Share wasn't a file server but what we would now call a SAN array. Workstations sent head, disk, sector (SCSI was new then so LBA not a standard) requests. Volumes were R/W for a single user or R/O for all. Shared R/W required applications to support APIs for access.

That's why Novell killed them. File services much better idea for user workstations.

3+Open used SMB and was a file server.

SMB first appeared in IBM LAN Program/DOS 3.1 and MS OEMed it as MS-Net. DOS was just too limited as a server OS so they partnered with 3Com to add networking to OS/2 in LAN Manager. 3Com got hosed on the deal by the way.

Re: Storage History: The 3Server

sfoskett — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 10:44:32 -0000

How could I, a Mass-hole myself, forget to mention Banyan? It was the first NOS I was exposed to when I was an undergrad at WPI! Thanks for pointing this out! I meant to be focusing on the 3Server, but Banyan deserved at least a shout-out!

Re: Storage History: The 3Server

tsa — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 06:39:03 -0000

Just for completeness, the third major player of that era was Banyan, with Banyan VINES. While I worked there, we moved VINES from a proprietary hardware platform to generic 386 servers and ultimately implemented it as services on top of SCO Unix. If you're going to cover this in a future segment, great. If not, readers can look up "Banyan" on wikipedia.org for a reasonably accurate summary.