MS-Net, sometimes stylized as MS-NET, was a
network operating system sold by
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...
in the 1980s, the earliest days of
local area networking.
Overview
MS-Net was not a complete networking system of its own; Microsoft licensed it to vendors who used it as the basis for server programs that ran on
MS-DOS
MS-DOS ( ; acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System, also known as Microsoft DOS) is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and a few op ...
, porting it to their own underlying networking hardware and adding services on top. Version 1.0 was announced on 14 August 1984 and released along with the
PC/AT on 2 April 1985. A number of MS-Net products were sold during the late 1980s, before it was replaced by
LAN Manager in 1990.
MS-Net's network interface was based on
IBM
International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...
's
NetBIOS protocol definition, which allowed it to be ported to different networking systems with relative ease. It did not implement the entire NetBIOS protocol, however, only the small number of features required for the server role. One key feature that was not implemented was NetBIOS's name management routines, a feature third parties often added back in. The system also supplied the program REDIR.EXE, which allowed transparent file access from DOS machines to any MS-Net based server.
Several products from the mid-to-late-1980s were based on the MS-Net system. IBM's PC-Net was a slightly modified version of the MS-Net system typically used with
Token Ring. MS partnered with
3Com to produce the more widely used
3+Share
3 (three) is a number, numeral and digit. It is the natural number following 2 and preceding 4, and is the smallest odd prime number and the only prime preceding a square number. It has religious and cultural significance in many societies ...
system running on a 3Com networking stack based on the
XNS protocol on
Ethernet
Ethernet ( ) is a family of wired computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN). It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 198 ...
. Other well-known systems, including
Banyan VINES and
Novell NetWare
NetWare is a discontinued computer network operating system developed by Novell, Inc. It initially used cooperative multitasking to run various services on a personal computer, using the Internetwork Packet Exchange, IPX network protocol. The f ...
, did not use MS-Net as their basis, using
Unix
Unix (, ; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...
and a custom OS, respectively. They did, however, allow access to their own files via the REDIR.EXE.
MS-Net was sold only for a short period of time. MS and 3Com collaborated on a replacement known as
LAN Manager running on
OS/2
OS/2 is a Proprietary software, proprietary computer operating system for x86 and PowerPC based personal computers. It was created and initially developed jointly by IBM and Microsoft, under the leadership of IBM software designer Ed Iacobucci, ...
, using the new
Server Message Block standard for file transfer. 3Com's version of the product retained their XNS-based protocol, but 3Com abandoned the server market not long after. MS's version remained based on NetBIOS and supported a number of underlying protocols and hardware. LAN Manager was itself replaced in 1993 by
Windows NT 3.1.
See also
*
Timeline of DOS operating systems
*
net (command)
References
"IBM PC and PC-Compatible NOSs Compared" U-M Computing News, Volume 2, Number 13 (1987), pp. 4–11.
{{Network operating systems
Discontinued Microsoft operating systems
Network operating systems
Proprietary operating systems
Assembly language software
1985 software