A crackling good story! To go from a struggling startup with negative sales to a billion-dollar company with seventy-percent market share ... To go from going bust making printers and computers to making history selling an industry-standard operating system ... To go from having six presidents in one year to making dozens of millionaires ... This is a crackling good story!

Surfing the High Tech Wave

A story of Novell's early years, 1980-1990By Roger Bourke White Jr.

AuthorHouse

Copyright © 2010 Roger Bourke White Jr.
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4520-2303-8

Contents

Preliminaries..........................................................ixOverview...............................................................xiIntroduction...........................................................xiiEntertainment, Education, and Employees................................xiiThe Novell Story.......................................................xiiiA Brief History of Events Leading to PC-Based LANs.....................xivWhy Call This a Revolution?............................................xviiThe Burning Questions..................................................xviiThe Enigmax............................................................viiiPart One The Foundation Years, 1980-84.................................1Chapter One Building Ray's Stage.......................................3The Acorn Is Planted...................................................3The Sapling Grows......................................................10The Year in Review.....................................................54Chapter Two 1982: The Time of Six Presidents...........................57Summary................................................................57The First Crisis: Jack Davis Departs...................................58The March Massacre of '82..............................................61The People of 1982.....................................................62After the Massacre.....................................................66Novell Data Systems in Retrospect......................................71Chapter Three 1983: Vision Unchained...................................74The New Man............................................................74The Entrepreneur.......................................................83The Diamond in the Rough...............................................96From the Outside.......................................................105Chapter Four Crossing the High Sierras.................................107Tunneling through Granite..............................................107Evolving beyond S-Net..................................................116Parting the Waters: NetBIOS and DOS 3.1................................132Building a Company Mission.............................................134Comdex 84..............................................................136Part Two Novell Emerges, 1984-88.......................................141The Technical Thread...................................................143CHAPTER FIVE The PC-Based LAN Revolution Begins........................145Early Technical Goals for NetWare......................................145Background: What's Happening in 1986...................................152Meeting the Challenges.................................................153Other Developments.....................................................156Sales and Trade Shows..................................................158The State of Play......................................................162The Cultural Thread....................................................163Chapter Six Corporate Culture..........................................165The Cycle of Life at Novell............................................165Coming of Age Financially..............................................167The Culture of Growth..................................................170Education and Marketing................................................176Making Novell "Bricks and Mortar"......................................181... and West Is West...................................................183Chairman Ray...........................................................190Chapter Seven Corporate Decisions......................................198International..........................................................198NetWare Centers and NetWare Everywhere.................................205Part Three Novell Matures, 1988-94.....................................221Chapter Eight The End of the Visionaries, 1988-89......................223Chapter Nine The End of the Revolution, 1989-94........................232

Chapter One

Building Ray's Stage

Ray Noorda didn't start Novell, Inc., from scratch in 1983. He bought a company: Novell Data Systems, Inc. (NDSI).

Novell Data Systems was the hopes and dreams of other people. It had been founded in 1980 and grew to 120 people in 1981, but by the end of 1982 had collapsed to 15 people. Things were so bad in late 1982 that NDSI's products were being returned faster than they were being sold.

But those 15 people left at the company had a dream ... a dream for a revolutionary product that would save the company. And Ray found that dream so exciting and real that he was willing to invest his time and money in this otherwise losing proposition to make it happen.

The dream was a local area network product that would become NetWare. The founders of the Novell we know today included Harry Armstrong, Craig Burton, Judith Clarke, and the SuperSet group of programmers.

These people made Novell and NetWare. To understand them you need to understand the Novell that they watched grow and collapse. They learned a lot watching that happen. And between what they learned and the experience Ray brought, they developed a winning product and a company that made an industry. To understand Novell, Inc., you need to understand the stage that it was built upon, NDSI.

The Novell Data Systems story is also important as a contrast: The goals of the companies were almost identical, but the results of the implementations were dramatically different.

The Acorn Is Planted

In the summer of 1980 two seasoned computer industry executives got together to start a company, Novell Data Systems. Like all good high tech entrepreneurs they intended for that company to shake the world. Unlike many, their company actually did-but hardly in the straightforward manner that they had envisioned.

Those men were Jack Davis and George Canova. They had been building dreams, experiences, and expectations for several years. Those meshed with the reality of the early '80s to make Novell happen the way it did.

Jack Davis

Jack Joins the Job Market

Jack Davis was born in Utah. He graduated from Brigham Young University (BYU) in 1961 with history and French degrees. Jack first found work in the growing minicomputer industry at NCR, the start of a long career pursuing the Muse of Technology. He moved to Phoenix when he started working for General Electric's disk-drive division. Later in the '60s his career took him to southern California where he joined up with CalComp, a maker of plotters and other minicomputer peripherals, heading up international sales. From CalComp he moved to General Automation and headed international sales there, too.

These were the hotbed days for minicomputers, and southern California contributed no less to the industry's development than Massachusetts ("Route 128") or the northern California Bay Area ("Silicon Valley"-alias Silicon Gulch to wags in Massachusetts).

Jack had wide circles of acquaintances in the southern California industry in the '60s and '70s. These later provided him with the manpower he needed to start Novell.

In the '70s he moved to Utah and became Director of International Sales for Beehive...