Pathworks
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PATHWORKS (copyright requires all letters capitalized) was the trade name used by
PATHWORKS server ran on
PATHWORKS was one of DEC's most successful products ever. Analysis of sales showed that on average, each PATHWORKS license brought in at least $3,000 USD in server revenue (server HW, SW, storage, printers, networking, and services), so it was a major driver for DEC's revenue in the mid and late 1980s.
Later versions of PATHWORKS were known as Advanced Server for OpenVMS (or Advanced Sever for Unix for
Features
Once installed onto the PCs, the PATHWORKS client provided the following features:[4]
- DECnet, and later TCP/IP and NetBEUI, end-node connectivity with the host and client systems
- PowerTerm 525 Ericom
- eXcursion, an X11server for Windows.
- File-transfer software. This was a DECnet-DOS file transfer utility, although it was somewhat superfluous because the PATHWORKS server software presented VMS or UNIX files to the PC clients as if they were PC files being served by a Windows server.
The PATHWORKS server software provided access to server file storage and print services using the native Microsoft protocols. Later versions of PATHWORKS servers on VMS supported NetWare and Macintosh clients, but they never achieved the volumes of the Microsoft clients. For clients running a GUI such as Windows 3.x, additional components available included an
Implementation
LanMan normally ran across Microsoft's basic, non-routable NetBIOS/NetBEUI NBF protocol, but PATHWORKS included a DECnet stack, including layers like the LAT transport used for terminal sessions. The complexity of DECnet by 1980s PC standards meant that the PATHWORKS client was a huge software stack to have resident in MS-DOS; configuring the PATHWORKS client was a complex task, made more so by the need to preserve enough conventional memory for DOS applications to run. To keep a reasonable amount of base memory free mandated the use of QEMM or a similar memory manager. This problem went away once 386-based PCs became prevalent and MS Windows provided built-in support for large amounts of memory.
References
- ^ Alan Abrahams; David A. Low (1992). "An Overview of the PATHWORKS Product Family" (PDF). Digital Technical Journal. 4 (1).
- ^ "PATHWORKS for DOS Overview" (PDF). bitsavers.org. August 1991. Retrieved 2021-01-01.
- ^ a b Andy Goldstein (2005). "Samba and OpenVMS" (PDF). de.openvms.org. Retrieved 2021-01-01.
- ^ Brad Cooper (1998-04-30). "Pathworks and NT". ITPro Today. Retrieved 2021-11-06.
Lawrence W. White - PATHWORKS Product Manager
Bob Nusbaum - PATHWORKS Product Manager