This really brings back some memories. My first career in IT was supporting and implementing an OS/2 Lan Server based banking implementation for a regional bank in the south. The bank deployed what was essentially a massive flat token ring based network interconnected via Fiber to regional areas and leased lines to branches. It was not Netbios over TCP/IP, it was straight up Netbios over the entire network. Given Netbios is broadcast based for resolution, broadcast storms were common across the network, so a gordian knot of filters and configs were setup at the routers to mitigate this. There was no concept of subnet based routing implemented yet.<p>I ended up taking a job with IBM supporting the TCP/IP stack on top of OS/2. It was a 24 year old me, and a grey beard 60 year old dude that literally supported the entire OS/2 Lan Server TCP/IP stack across the world during the time that corporate networks were just beginning to connect to the Internet. Everyone else on the OS/2 support team at IBM just punted to us anything that was TCP/IP related and thought we were wizards or something. What a wild time to be alive.
<i>> “Sometimes I have the following problem to deal with: An OS/2 system uses NetBIOS over TCP/IP (aka TCPBEUI) and should communicate with a SMB server (likewise using TCPBEUI) on a different subnet.”</i><p>I wonder if there is literally anyone else in the world who has this problem in 2024.<p>Jokes aside, I appreciate the detailed work that OS/2 Museum does. From a developer’s point of view it often feels like everything is a Unix nowadays, so it’s easy to forget that the PC revolution’s mainstream came from very different commercial origins and gradually blended with the more “academic” tech like TCP/IP.
A tangentially related networking trivia that probably won’t be useful to anyone here:<p>NetBEUI (the original MS networking, running directly over Ethernet rather than TCP/IP), was using LLC-2 Ethernet frames, and as such it was a great way to test DLSw (data link switching) in a very simple lab (two windows 95 machines, separated by two routers, connected via IP link).<p>Why was that ever a thing? Because of<p><a href="https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/zos-basic-skills?topic=llc2-how-connection-is-established-over-lan" rel="nofollow">https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/zos-basic-skills?topic=llc2-how-...</a><p>And most of IBM networking used Token Ring rather than Ethernet, which was harder to get hold of and more expensive.