Ray Noorda Dead at 82 41
HaeMaker writes to tell us that Ray Noorda passed away today at the age of 82. Noorda was best known for his leadership role at the helm of Novell Inc. Known to some as the "father of network computing" Noorda took the then small Novell from around 17 employees to well over 12,000.
His involvement with the UniXware purchase? (Score:4, Interesting)
As a UnixWare administrator at the time, I had had great hopes for it. It was the premiere UNIX for x86 computers at the time, and the sale to Novell brought a lot of hope to a lot of people. Linux was just becoming strong, and the BSDs had just resumed again after the lawsuit. We were thinking that Novell would really push UnixWare, and attempt to make it become one of the most widely-used PC operating systems.
Unfortunately, that did not happen. In many ways, that may have been a good thing. I personally think it was a bit saddening, as UnixWare was a rather fantastic system at the time.
RIP (Score:5, Interesting)
An old Ray Story (Score:5, Interesting)
It's a shame that, IMHO, certain people took advantage of him as his intellect started to slip, and no parent should have to outlive his own daughter. Still, he was a giant in his day, and he funded a lot of startups while never being personally greedy (at least that I saw).
I am glad to have known him.
Re:His involvement with the UniXware purchase? (Score:2, Interesting)
The dream was to combine UNIX with NetWare to create a kick-ass application server to counter the emergent Windows NT vision. Recall that UNIX had split into two camps - ATT/SUN and IBM/DEC/HP - but they were starting to work together better.
Novell had great ties to IBM. Novell got along okay with HP. Novell got along great with AT&T.
This was also the period in which Chorus and MACH micro-kernels were making great strides in getting attention from OS vendors.
Well, there was one proposal to bring things together around a micro-kernel. There was even a chance to bring OS/2 into the grand unification effort.
But it was too much - too many conflicting performance / security / legacy issues to deal with. The technologists couldn't bring themselves to make all the compromises necessary for such a combination to succeed.
In the end, Novell realized the unification wouldn't happen, and split up UNIX, selling part to HP and the distribution rights to the old SCO, who needed it to upgrade their OpenServer products (I think).
The rest, as they say, is history - Linux ascendent, SCO sold their name and UNIX distribution rights to Caldera (a Novell spinoff, funded by Ray Noorda). Caldera management changes then led to their ill-advised resurrection of the SCO name and disasterous law suit against IBM and Novell.