Superset

Origins as a hardware company

During the first calendar quarter of 1982, heavy costs continued to be incurred at Novell Data Systems, which resulted in management shuffles, organizational consolidations, and a significant layoff. Canova was fired and Jack Messman, representing Safeguard Scientifics, was named president. Seeing Snipes being played on three different types of personal computers persuaded Messman that SuperSet's networking technology was valuable. The poor performance of Novell Data Systems resulted in losses being announced in April 1982 for the publicly-held Safeguard Scientifics and put pressure on that company's stock price. However, by this point the computer-linking work that the SuperSet group had produced was drawing considerable interest and Novell Data Systems was describing themselves as a company that made not just stand-alone microcomputers but also products for local area networking (LAN). The dual emphasis on hardware and software products continued for several months but continued to have troubled results, and in July 1982 another round of layoffs took place which resulted in the employee count being reduced from 50 people to 30.