1989 Networking: OS/2 NetWare Requester 1.1

When I wrote about the pre-release NetWare Requester for OS/2, the oldest archived officially released NetWare OS/2 Requester was version 1.2 from 1990. In the meantime, version 1.1 of the requester showed up, although I only became aware of that very recently.

Technically the 1.1 Requester does not appear to be vastly different from the 1.0 pre-release. Which is unsurprising, because the OS/2 1.1 kernel was not that different from OS/2 1.0; the big news in OS/2 1.1 was the Presentation Manager GUI, but that was not something Novell cared about at the time.

The Requester was shipped on three disks, labeled SYSTEM, PUBLIC-1, and PUBLIC-2. As the names suggest, the PUBLIC-1 and PUBLIC-2 disks were meant to be copied on the server, whie the SYSTEM disk needed to be installed on each OS/2 workstation.

Unlike the pre-release, the 1.1 Requester came with an actual installer, although what it did was a little underwhelming.

The installer copies files but does not actually change CONFIG.SYS at all. Instead, Novell provided a template which can be appended to the existing CONFIG.SYS and edited to enable the desired components (SPX, named pipe support, NetBIOS).

The user also has to pick the right driver. Novell provided a good selection of drivers, for Ethernet (Novell NE1000, NE2000, 3Com 3C501, 3C503, 3C505) as well as IBM PC Network, Token Ring, and Novell RX Net.

When the system is booted, one is greeted by familiar (to OS/2 users) colorful Novell banner messages:

There’s the LSL, an ODI driver, IPX protocol driver, and finally the requester itself.

The PUBLIC disks included OS/2 versions of all core utilities like LOGIN/LOGOUT, SLIST, or MAP, as well as several full-screen tools like FILER and SYSCON.

It was possible to run those utilities in OS/2 console windows as shown above.

The NetWare OS/2 Requester 1.1 was released in September 1989, same time as NetWare 386 (aka NetWare 3.0). Because NetWare 2.x version at the time didn’t support OS/2 clients, Novell shipped the PUBLIC-1 and PUBLIC-2 disks with the Requester. Later on, the OS/2 Requester was shipped with NetWare.

Technically the 1.1 Requester differs in one key aspect from its 1990 follow-on, the version 1.2 Requester. The latter uses the Installable File System (IFS) technology introduced in OS/2 1.2, but that did not yet exist in OS/2 1.1.

The user experience with the NetWare OS/2 Requester 1.1 is extremely similar to DOS. Most of the utilities look and work the same between DOS and OS/2. All in all, it’s a nice little package that makes it easy to integrate OS/2 1.1 workstation into a NetWare network.