On Tuesday 15 November 2005 01:32 am, Anders Johansson wrote:
On Monday 14 November 2005 19:26, Steven T. Hatton wrote:
For one, from working with Novell NetWare Networks in the early '90s. I just checked my textbooks form college. The text I used in my MIS cakewalk, ur...uh..., I mean to say course, data from 1991, gives the definition of a client running on one box and server on another.
That's not a definition, just a common configuration.
I was referring to the glossary entries. Call them what you will.
Of course Microsoft didn't use that configuration back then, because they hadn't yet noticed that whole networking thing. It took them a while to catch on.
It's more complex than that. Bear in mind that Microsoft and IBM were at one time very closely intertwined. NT is actually fork of the OS/2 project. There was LANMAN long, long ago.
A client and server will necessarily run on the same machine if you don't have support for networking
Be all that as it may. What Micosoft did with WFW and then NT was to change the mentality of the industry. What people were calling client/server in the halls of academia and the acclaimed thinktanks such as Bell Labs and Xerox PARC is really irrelevant to what the average network administrator was calling client/server. It's not a question of where the technology originated; it's a question of who capitalized on it. Novell saw NT coming and tried to head it off with UnixWare. But the UI for UnixWare was unfamiliar and inadequate. I really wanted to learn UnixWare. But I didn't have time between my college courses and the demand by management that I remain "productive". I could learn NT easily because I already knew the UI, and it provided an intuitive interface. I didn't need to read the man page on ifconfig to get a network card configured. I also had existing apps that I could run on NT but not on UnixWare. That is going to remain a problem for Linux for quite some time. This in why I was infavor of Wine and am grudgingly in favor of Mono and DotGnu. It's also on of the big reasons I like Java. Do underestimate Micorsoft. Dave Cutler ain't no slouch. They've also bought Herb Sutter and Stan (aughta be ashamed) Lipmann.
The fact that there was a confusion in terminology doesn't negate the fact that they were still using daemons in exactly the same way as Microsoft used "services". I haven't heard of any machine being singly dedicated to a single task
You mean like a file server? That was Novell's biggest weakness. Their biggest chunk of the market was a dog that only did one trick for most people. Sure it could do other things, but NT could either do the same, or Microsoft would claim it could. You were typically ass-deep in Microsoft products before you discovered that MS/SQL distributed DB synchronization was vaporware. You can call me overly conservative, but one of the things I want to be sure of when I assert that Linux can support something is that I am telling the truth. Longterm, that is an irreplaceable commodity. Steven