It is an interesting piece of history. This dates back from when MS thought that all networking should be peer-to-peer (and that 640K was a lot of memory). IBM knew better and built domain controllers into OS/2.<p>As an anecdote - I worked on the team that was sub-contracted by IBM to write this. The spec was considered super secret and so had to be kept under lock and key. IBM security would confiscate any loose documents and leave a red card. One red card is a warning, two and you're off the project, three and the project is cancelled.<p>We'd just had a red card so were on alert when, late one evening, we discovered an unlocked cupboard on the final sweep. So we saved the spec in another cuprboard and for a joke left the old red card behind. The PM, who's spec it was, came in early the next day - obviously before the devs who left late the night before, found the red card and phoned security to get it back.<p>The ensuing "YOU'VE LOST THE SECRET SPEC!" conversation spiralled around like crazy until we came in and managed to calm everybody down. The PM still had to do a lot of grovelling.
Moral of the story - probably best not to attempt a joke with anything security related.
I never used LANMAN, but the spec makes for some interesting reading...<p><i>> NOTE: Due to a temporary restriction in CMD.EXE, it is not possible to use the DIR command on a UNC pathname, as in DIR \ \BIGSERVE\ANYNAME. This will be fixed in a future release. The DosFindFirst API call will accept UNC pathnames.</i><p>I always wondered about this... apparently the restriction carried over to the Windows port and was never fixed... maybe they didn't want to bloat cmd.exe with needing to "NET USE" UNC paths behind the scenes? Who knows!
Direct link to PDF : <a href="http://www.os2museum.com/files/docs/os210sdk/lanman-prod-spec-1987.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://www.os2museum.com/files/docs/os210sdk/lanman-prod-spe...</a><p>As a new-ish PM, I find it fascinating to read specs like these. Gives me valuable ideas on how the specs I write should look like. Fellow HN readers : Got any other good spec sheets you have seen?