The wheel turns: look at the past of computing to see the future

Dave Farquhar wrote a nice little article asking What happened to 3Com? A fun article but it is incomplete. It misses out on the company's height.In the early days it has its own server OS, 3Com 3+Share. It was a multitasking file server OS and it was based on MS-DOS. Yes really. An internally multitasking server stack on DOS. I became expert in it in my first job and my 3rd job leant heavily on that and my skills.It used the MS LAN Manager stack over NetBEUI.It inherited DOS limitations like 32MB partitions. On PC servers everything had to for into 640kB of RAM and natively it could not use XMS, only EMS.3Com offered a range of dedicated network file server boxes, the 3Server. The first was an 80186 and later the 3Server3 with a 386.Then it got big into OS/2 and released 3Com 3+Open. The multitasking stuff obviated by OS/2 1.0's own built in multitasking but now it was multiprotocol and the server could run other stuff too.The 3Server had no display, no port for one, no keyboard…

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