All Historic Network Operating Systems: NetWare and Banyan VINES

NetWare and Banyan VINES were rival network operating systems that dominated local area networking in businesses and universities during the 1980s and into the 1990s, before being displaced by general purpose operating systems with built in networking. Novell's NetWare, first released in 1983, became the most widely deployed local area network operating system of its era, valued for the efficiency and reliability of its dedicated file and print server software. Banyan VINES, developed by Banyan Systems and first released in 1984, used a Unix based kernel and offered a global directory service called StreetTalk that was ahead of comparable Novell and Microsoft offerings at the time, giving it real technical strengths among NetWare's competitors even though it never won a comparably large customer base. Both products are now retired, discontinued network operating systems, remembered today as the two most technically capable rivals of the pre-Windows-NT era of local area networking.