Editing NetWare (section)

=== NetWare for OS/2 ===
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Promised as early as 1988, when the Microsoft-IBM collaboration was still ongoing and [[OS/2]]&nbsp;1.''x'' was still a 16-bit product,<ref name="NW_1988"/> the product didn't become commercially available until after IBM and Microsoft had parted ways and OS/2&nbsp;2.0 had become a 32-bit, pre-emptive multitasking and multithreading OS.

By August 1993,<ref name="NW_2"/> Novell released its first version of "NetWare for OS/2". This first release supported OS/2&nbsp;2.1 (1993) as the base OS, and required that users first buy and install IBM OS/2, then purchase NetWare&nbsp;4.01, and then install the NetWare for OS/2 product. It retailed for $200.<ref name="NW_2"/>

By around 1995, and coincidental with IBM's renewed marketing push for its 32-bit OS/2 Warp OS, both as a desktop client and as a LAN server (OS/2 Warp Server), NetWare for OS/2 began receiving some good press coverage. "NetWare 4.1 for OS/2" allowed to run Novell's network stack and server modules on top of IBM's 32-bit kernel and network stack. It was basically NetWare 4.''x'' running as a service on top of OS/2. It was compatible with third party client and server utilities and NetWare Loadable Modules.<ref name="IW"/>

Since IBM's 32-bit OS/2 included Netbios, IPX/SPX and TCP/IP support, this means that sysadmins could run all three most popular network stacks on a single box, and use the OS/2 box as a workstation too. NetWare for OS/2 shared memory on the system with OS/2 seamlessly. The book "Client Server survival Guide with OS/2" described it as "[[glue code]] that lets the unmodified NetWare&nbsp;4.''x'' server program think it owns all resources on a OS/2 system". It also claimed that a NetWare server running on top of OS/2 only suffered a 5% to 10% overhead over NetWare running over the bare metal hardware, while gaining OS/2's pre-emptive multitasking and object oriented GUI.<ref name="Survival"/>

Novell continued releasing bugfixes and updates to NetWare for OS/2 up to 1998.<ref name="Secure_support"/>