Talk:MS-Net

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Thanks![edit]

Maury, thanks for creating this! It's been a gap in our coverage that I've wanted to get filled for some time. Now my timeline has lost one of its few red links! Wbm1058 (talk) 19:06, 9 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Aww, shucks. Maury Markowitz (talk) 20:28, 9 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

BTW...[edit]

I strongly suspect this article is still missing some details.

One is that it seems MS sold a "bare" version of MS-Net for running directly on DOS machines being sold by 3rd parties. I've seen several references to this, including this one which seems to suggest it was known as "Microsoft Networks" in that case. However, given that MS-Net was on top of NetBIOS, that leaves the question as to what networking would be used in these cases. It is very well possible that it was "anything the vendor used", but I'd like some concrete examples before stating this in the article.

But that being the case, that leads me to ponder what 3+ was... was it simply a version of MS-Net with a few added features? Or was it a bundle one could add to other PC's that didn't come with MS-Net out of the box? Again, I need to find more sources to clarify this.

There's also some confusion about the application protocols.The NetWorld article states that MS-Net used SMB, but SMB histories suggest it was not developed until two years later.

So, more to come...

Maury Markowitz (talk) 20:37, 9 October 2014 (UTC)[reply]

I worked for RM, a UK PC manufacturer, in the 1980s. Since our main market was schools where networking was seen as an important way to save costs, we implemented MS-Net as soon as it came out.

MS-Net could run on any network hardware. Just as manufacturers had to write device drivers to implement MS-DOS on their PCs, particularly if they were not full IBM-compatibles, similarly network vendors had to implement MS-Net on their hardware. RM initially used Zilog's Z-Net.

We weren't happy with the performance of MS-Net and were able to persuade Microsoft to give us the source code, which we then optimised. I spent a happy week in Redmond showing their developer (yes, there was only one developer working on MS-Net!) what we had done.

MS-Net definitely used SMB. There seem to be a lot of articles suggesting Microsoft didn't adopt SMB until Lan Manager. That is wrong. I'm with NetWorld and disagree with the SMB histories.

My memory may be faulty on this next point, but I don't think MS-Net used NetBIOS. It may be that IBM's implementation did, but I don't think it was built-in to MS-Net. Prh47bridge (talk) 18:45, 14 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]