More NetWare *Technical* (Patreon)

This is a follow-up to my previous post on the subject, with some additional insights.

The Apple employee who worked on NetWare for PPC imaged the unreleased NetWare 4 demo disc for me, which I forwarded through Neozeed (Virtually Fun blog) to be dissected by someone with more expertise than I. It was Cameron Kaiser, who helped me with my Apple Network Server video research. He was able to properly dissect it, and his highly detailed report can be found here.

https://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2023/12/when-power-macintosh-ran-netware.html

The owner of the disc told me:

"All of this was with the intention of shipping on the Shiner."

https://support.novell.com/techcenter/articles/dnd19950304.html

He felt it would only work on a 6100 or maybe a 7100.

"6100/7100 was used for development because the hardware was much further along than the ANS (and easier for engineers to have in the cubes.) We did use a tiny MacOS boot volume initially as a boot loader to the boot into the NetWare partition. Eventually we moved to using OpenFirmware for the boot process and got rid of the legacy boot volume. I can't remember what’s on the disk image if it had the MacOS stuff but the code only briefly runs before it natively runs from the NetWare partition."

"The open firmware boot stuff I mentioned in my last email was part of  the CHRP initiative. I remember being in meeting with Jon Rubinstein when he was at FirePower (an PPC a lone manufacture) about CHRP and  OpenFirmware. If you remember he headed Apple hardware when Jobs returned and later went to Palm (I worked for him briefly there.)"

"I think when this was written they were going to support PPC, MIPS, SPARC  and the HP RISC. But they soon dumped the others to focus solely on PPC.  It was all part of their PIN (Platform Independent Netware) initiative."

Great insight into a killed project at Apple. I was honoured that my ANS video prompted the Apple employee to share this with the retro community.