InternetWeek: Novell Buys Unix, Again

“Remember the headlines from just more than 10 years ago about
Novell buying Unix Systems Labs (USL) from AT&T for $270
million worth of stock? That was back in the days before Linus got
started on Linux and when the majority of network file servers were
running NetWare. In 1993, DOS was still a big deal. Graphical
interfaces were still mostly found on Macintoshes. IBM was still
selling plenty of mainframes, and it still had high hopes for OS/2
and TopView.

“Ten years ago, Unix was mostly a techie curiosity, being run
sub-rosa by IT managers who were so early to the market that it was
more of a cult following than an operating system. Ten years ago,
directory services was a novel idea and relatively unknown. Indeed,
the concept was so new that Microsoft spent a lot of time
convincing people that they didn’t need it and should wait until
their product was good enough for public consumption. (One could
argue that we are still waiting, and that Novell’s product is still
far better than Microsoft’s Active Directory…)”

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