I remember with alacrity exactly where I was and what I was doing in 1990. Heck, I was the only one (the Highlander?), in an office full of engineers with nothing but Dec terminals linked to a VAX, that even had a PC. It would be another year or two before they'd all get PC's, when they'd realized that their compiler vendor now made an edition that newly ran under DOS, and by Jove, you could get a cheap EEPROM burner thingy on a ribbon cable attached to your PC. No need to trot down the hall to the VAX to burn a prom - woohoo! Pre Windows 3.1, you had a choice of running some El-cheapo IBM LANBIOS compatible DOS driver ethernet stack provided gratis by 3COM with the purchase of an adapter, I think it was, or you went the high dollar route with IPX/SPX & NetWare. 1992 rolled around with Windows 3.1 and overturned the whole table, mooting the expense of a separate driver you had to pay for. One would love to have been a fly-on-the-wall at Novell HQ to witness the very beginning moment of it's demise.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
