NT wasn’t the only Lucy-and-a-football of that era. I worked on processor independent Netware (Alpha, MIPS, PPC, PA-RISC, perhaps another I’ve forgotten). Or course it all was for naught, though I got some good stories out of it.
Netware and its history is something I'd love to hear more about. I got into IT support in 1995-96 and saw a fair amount of Netware 3.12 and later 4.11 but chose a Microsoft-centric path for my "day job" and a Linux-centric path for my personal computing. Netware seemed interesting but much harder to find low-level details about. NDS was interesting, but the promoted advantages over NT 3.51/4.0 domains weren't an issue in the size of NT deployments I worked on.
I'd certainly never heard of this processor-independent Netware effort. Its history sounds intriguing.
YouTube Computer History Museum "Oral History of Kanwal Rekhi" (Excelan, Novell CTO) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ox0e7yVgsXM has some interesting stories about early Ethernet adapters made by Excelan, Novell, their strategies, Lite products and bonkers ideas (Mormon run, trying to compete with Microsoft, hate of Unix despite owning it).
I worked at Novell in 2006-7 after they bought (what became) Domain Services for Windows from my company. This enabled eDirectory to become an Active Directory compatible domain controller. Integrating the two worlds (whilst imperfect) was a lot of fun and there were some great people there. And, as someone who loves computing history, it was great to delve into the back story of NetWare and NDS.
Was this for Cygnus? I know Apple was talking a lot of crap about PIN for the Workgroup Servers (at least what became the 9150, anyway). Did the PowerPC version ever boot on any Power Macs?
