The previously mentioned warez dump on archive.org contains a lot of little gems that would have been otherwise lost. One of those might be 3Com’s networking package from 1989, the 3+Open LAN Manager version 1.1.
The software was released in August 1989, a few months before OS/2 1.2 became available, and well over a year before Microsoft released LAN Manager 2.0. In the late 1980s, Microsoft produced LAN Manager 1.x, but their distribution strategy mirrored OS/2 and DOS. Microsoft did not sell LAN Manager to end users but rather licensed it to OEMs, and 3Com may have been the biggest of those.
3Com collaborated with Microsoft on LAN Manager development and co-developed the NDIS specification for network drivers; that is why 3Com copyrights can be seen even in later Microsoft networking software.
Recovery
The first order of business was turning fifteen ZIP archives into something usable. Unfortunately, incompetent pirates of old just zipped up the contents of installation disks instead of creating floppy images. Usually they at least the decency to provide the bootable OS installation disk in the form of TeleDisk image, but in this case they didn’t even bother with that.
I had to take an existing OS/2 floppy with the right kind of boot sector (looking for OS2LDR and not IBMBIO.COM or OS2BIO.COM) and extract the installation files on it. That produced a bootable floppy of MS OS/2 1.1… but not regular OS/2 1.1:
3+Open shipped with a “Server Adaptation” version of MS OS/2 1.1, updated in 1989. The Server Adaptation supported a much larger disk cache and also gave the user the choice of three different shells when installing:
The default was Program Selector, the same shell as OS/2 1.0. Also available was Presentation Manager, the default and only choice for standard OS/2 1.1 installations. The third option was “Minimum Shell” intended for dedicated servers that would not run any user applications.
It should be noted that the 3+Open LAN Manager server did not require the Server Adaptation of OS/2 and could be installed on any OS/2 1.1 or even 1.0 system with sufficiently powerful hardware (especially RAM).
Other than the boot disk, restoring the OS/2 system install floppies was trivial. The LAN Manager disks, on the other hand, were not quite as easy.
That is, unpacking the ZIP archives onto floppies was simple enough… but the resulting LAN Manager server could not be installed, and after manually working around the problem, wouldn’t run.
I quickly realized what the problem was: The ZIP archives didn’t store empty directories. And it just so happens that the LAN Manager installation depends on those. With a bit of informed guesswork I was able to re-create the missing empty directories and get a working LAN Manager server and clients.
The 3+Open LAN Manager can be installed in four different ways (all using the same installer on the SERVER_1 disk): OS/2 server, OS/2 workstation (aka netstation in 3Com parlance), a DOS enhanced workstation, and a DOS basic workstation.
The enhanced DOS workstation is functionally similar to the OS/2 workstation, with a full-fledged NET command and support for messaging and such. The basic workstation can only redirect drives and printers and has an very limited NET command, but uses less memory.
One of the ZIP archives was corrupted. Fortunately the disk included software for 3Com’s 3Station hardware, not necessary for 3+Open running on standard machines.
Installation
Installing the Server Adaptation of OS/2 was not particularly interesting, other than the shell choice mentioned above. It was also convenient that the OS included a driver for a PS/2 mouse.
As an aside, it is interesting that IBM chose a different tack with their Extended Edition. OS/2 1.1 EE never came with any limited or text mode shell, it always used the full Presentation Manager. It is likely that while a dedicated LAN Manager server would perhaps be placed in a closed somewhere and would not be used locally, IBM’s database and communications servers were not expected to be quite so hands-off.
The next step was installing the OS/2 based LAN Manager server:
The installation is not difficult (after fixing the installation disks), but there is one choice to make that probably isn’t obvious, and that is the networking protocol used by the server. After reading the documentation which is very helpfully available on bitsavers, I decided to go with the basic NBP (NetBIOS Protocol) which is supposed to be smaller and faster than the others. For interoperability with older 3Com networks, XNS would have been used.
It should be noted that 3Com’s NBP is not compatible with NetBEUI used by LAN Manager 2.0. Microsoft later published a KB article explaining the various options for getting LAN Manager and 3+Open LAN Manager 1.1 to talk to each other.
The NIC choice is almost entirely limited to 3Com adapters. When setting up client machines, the installer additionally offers the original 3Com EtherLink (3C501); for servers, it was considered inadequate. I used the EtherLink II emulation in VirtualBox for both server and clients and it worked without any trouble.
Next I set up an OS/2 1.0 workstation. The 3Com network installer is really not difficult to use and sets everything up. As long as all the usernames and passwords match, everything works great:
Interestingly, when there are frequent username or password mismatches, the server starts complaining:
That alert proved useful because it made me realize that I didn’t set up the user accounts correctly.
Next I went on to set up DOS clients, first the Enhanced variety:
And I followed with the Basic DOS workstation for good measure:
Both worked and were able to share files stored on the server.
LAN Manager provides a full-screen text based interface for basic configuration and management:
The interface looks the same on OS/2 (above) and DOS (below).
LAN Manager servers can be managed through the NET ADMIN interface both locally and from an OS/2 workstation.
It is notable that 3+Open LAN Manager 1.1 used NDIS based networking drivers on both OS/2 and DOS, rather than the monolithic drivers used in LAN Manager 1.0.
LAN Vision
The archive included at least one disk that wasn’t part of 3+Open per se. It was LAN Vision, 3Com’s add-on product for server monitoring.
Not a lot of information has survived about LAN Vision. It was an add-on to install and run as an additional service on the 3+Open server. The service collected various statistics which could be analyzed and viewed on OS/2 workstations, or exported into a spreadsheet format.
There was a full-screen OS/2 version of LAN Vision which I couldn’t quite get to work, but there was also a Presentation Manager version that did work. Here is a list of various statistics that can be displayed:
The actual display is nothing all that special, just showing the statistics in a graph form. This was probably a lot more impressive in 1989 than it is now.
Memory Manager
An interesting nugget is somewhat hidden on the DOS Basic Workstation disk. It’s called 3COMEMM, or 3Com Expanded Memory Manager. It must be installed manually, but it really does work:
It is obviously an OEM version of 386MAX 4.05. Qualitas supplied OEM versions of 386MAX to dozens of OEMs, and 3Com was one of them. On 386 machines (there were no 486 systems yet when 3+Open LAN Manager 1.1 came out) 3COMEMM allowed users to reclaim precious conventional memory, even when using the dreaded DOS 4.01. 3COMEMM obviously also provided expanded memory (EMM) emulation; EMM was widely used by late 1980s software since it was a technology applicable to any PC, from the original 8088 based machines to 386s.
DOS Manager
For DOS users, 3Com shipped a customized version of DOS Manager, Microsoft’s early attempt to make DOS somewhat more user friendly.
DOS Manager was a predecessor of the DOS Shell shipped with DOS 5.0. It was only available through OEMs, not directly from Microsoft.
Conclusion
3+Open is a networking package for DOS and OS/2 1.0/1.1 clients, contemporary with NetWare 2.x. It is very similar to Microsoft’s newer LAN Manager 2.0, but 3Com shipped 3+Open with a fair number of protocol options and various add-ons, not to mention support for 3Com’s XNS-based networking software. It is also one of the very few networking packages that support OS/2 1.0 clients (along with early versions of Novell’s OS/2 Requester).
Although the 3+Open LAN Manager 1.1 supports 3Com’s own 3Station systems, it will run on more or less any OS/2 or DOS system. The only requirement is a 3Com NIC, although even that could probably be overcome with a bit of effort and the right driver in hand.
For the network server, 3+Open LAN Manager 1.1 ships with a curious “Server Adaptation” of OS/2 1.1 with support for a bigger and better disk cache and an optional minimal shell suitable for dedicated servers. The Server Adaptation of OS/2 was effectively replaced by HPFS386 in LAN Manager 2.0, which was installed on top of standard OS/2 1.2.
There is obviously a fairly straight line from LAN Manager 1.x to LAN Manager 2.x to LAN Manager built into Windows NT and to today’s Windows based file and print sharing.
Thinking about it, I wonder why OS/2 2.0 did not ship with all these shells. One of the classic problems with OS/2 and Hercules were people running servers.
Cool!
Suggestion: Test what happens if you connect it to the same network as a computer running Windows 2000 with NetBEUI enabled. I did this many years ago with an older 3Com server, that I think was 8086 based, and that resulted in the hard dish trashing for a while and then the installation became corrupt :O
Re the protocol:
I wonder if it’s only the NETBIOS transport that differs? I.E. if you load the 3Com MBP driver, will the stock Microsoft client work with that Netbios implementation? Or for that sake would the “IBM PC Network program” (or whatever it’s called) run with the 3Com MBP driver?
Also will the 3com client run using a Microsoft supplied NetBEUI driver (connecting to a Microsoft/IBM server)?
I wonder how much/little work it would be to create an implementation of the MBP protocol for any newer OS? Not that there would be much use for it, but on the other hand there isn’t much “use” in all the vintage computing things we are up to anyways 🙂 I would think that if the SMB protocol itself is the same, it might be possible to create a MBP protocol driver for say NT or Windows for Workgroups and use that with the 3Com client.
Also weird suggestion to test: What about running the 3Com MBP protocol driver in conjunction with “Microsoft Windows for Workgroups for DOS”? Would that end up as a DOS server that unmodified 3Com MBP can connect to?
MiaM: The SMB protocol it’s not the same, there were lots of versions of this protocol (there is a document somewhere at the Microsoft site listing the different versions of SMB/CIFS. It appears that Microsoft lost the specifications of the different versions of the protocol and the people who knew doesn’t work at Microsoft anymore and currently the best way to see the the different versions and the interoperability circus it’s to see the source of SAMBA.
Cool article, I suppose that the DLC protocol it’s the Data Link Control of IBM, would that be used to connect to Mainframes or just as transport?, probably the later.
The 3Com documentation only says this: “Use the DLC protocol if communication with IBM servers using DLC is required.” I suppose it’s one of those situations where if you don’t know for sure that you need it, you don’t need it.
It is totally unclear to me if this would include, say, Token Ring networks with IBM PC Network or PC LAN Program or OS/2 Extended Edition/LAN Server.
@Fernando:
Re SMB: I know that there are different dialects and whatnot, but afaik they are supposed to be backwards compatible to a large extent (except when support for older versions was dropped on purpose (due to security reasons and whatnot).
According to pdf-page 88, book page 4-3, of the book Haugdahl_-_Inside_the_Token-Ring_3ed_1990.pdf
DLC is something that sits above MAC (media access protocol) and on top of DLC sits both NETBIOS and also APPC (used for SNA and whatnot).
But also, according to that book, DLC directly has support for both datagrams and circuit connections (for a lack of a better wording, equivalent to TCP in TCP/IP, but not TCP/IP). I wonder if the book is correct or if DLC rather is one protocol and the Netbios implementation is another protocol that both talks directly to the low level hardware driver?
To make things more complicated, in DOS both uses the same INT API, where the function code 00-03 = DLC, 04 and upwards = NETBIOS.
@Michal
I wonder if 3Com could run SMB over DLC rather than over their own Netbios implementation, and the idea was to use the same protocol both for file/printer sharing and also to allow clients to connect to mainframes? Likely using more memory than their protocol that only implements Netbios, but probably uses less memory than having to have two separate protocols installed.
DLC is part of SNA. It is more or less the equivalent of the data-link layer in the OSI model. I have vague recollections of setting up OS/2 Communications Manager in the mid 90’s to get 3270 sessions going using SNA over TokenRing.
This may help
https://www.filibeto.org/sun/lib/networking/internetworking_technology_overview/IBM%20Systems_Network_Architecture_(SNA)_Protocols.pdf
You can read 3Com’s documentation as well as I can: https://bitsavers.org/communications/3Com/3+Open/4695-02_3+Open_LAN_Manager_Installation_and_Setup_Guide_Aug89.pdf#page=34&zoom=auto,-180,626
I think the “OS2BOOT.COM” file on the first floppy is the original boot sector.
Thank you