Banyan VINES

If you were going to bring computers into your organization, just the desktop PC, you had to start making decisions on each of these components.

Would you have a token ring or ethernet? And would you connect all your computers to a server in your server closet? How would the cables run? Did you have an Ethernet card? Did you have a token ring card? Did you have Banyan Vines? Did you have a hard drive? Or was the data stored centrally? What kind of video cards? All that stuff was the work we did in IT.

And it was arduous and painful.

And then at some point, it all became abstracted and simple.

And I remember all the layers in that, too, when I was using the original Windows UIs, where Winsock was ubiquitous.

But I might still run AppleTalk as a communication protocol or NetBully or Banyan Vines or IPX, SPX.

I'm trying to remember the dropdown.

Yeah.

but that it those those layers were separate and that helps me understand where this abstraction exists within between between the applications

so not to sound like a complete microsoft hater we actually need to give a lot of respect to the guys in redmond who designed their api abstraction layer because they did an amazing job of software design there One thing that Windows absolutely got right is you can introspect this stack.

You can say to the code, what are your endpoints? How do I call you? What version are you? What protocols do you talk? If I talk Banyan Vines, which are the options that I can select in that? They do all those kinds of things inherently in their software.

And so that ability to say, oh my God, I'm an ancient word processing program, but I've got a connector that needs to talk on the database.