TCP/IP, FTP, and MSDOS?

Sridhar Ayengar wrote: Something like that, yes. NDIS was MICROS~1's, ODI was Novell's. The first "DOS TCP/IP stacks" were monolithic applications that did everything from terminal emulation and TFTP service to talk to the 3Com 3C50[01]. That was MIT PC/IP. PC/IP got turned into a product at The Wollongong Group: WIN/PC. Some of the folks from MIT saw the ad, recognized PC/IP in it, and said "hey, we could do that!" They got a deal on some green binders and FTP Software was born, or maybe it was the other way around. (Disclaimer: I worked for TWG, but not 'til 1989.) As the variety of PC Ethernet adapters grew, the stacks got decoupled loading a card driver TSR, then the stack TSR, then the configuration, and then you could run network applications. This was still pesky as the stack vendors still typically had to write their own drivers and application vendors had to have different versions of their networked applications to talk to each stack. FTP Software came up with the "packet driver" specification for the interface to their network card drivers. Novell came up with ODI which I think stood for Open Driver Interface. MICROS~1 was pushing LAN Manager about this time (very late 1980s early 1990s) and came up with NDIS. One benefit of these interfaces was that multiple protocol stacks (e.g. Netware and TCP/IP) could share the card. I remember in the early 1990s, TWG had "dedicated" drivers for a variety of Ethernet cards (and one for SLIP), and there was a "shim" driver that provided an interface between the stack and a packet driver. Later there were "shim" drivers for ODI and NDIS too. Before the ODI driver was written, there was a set of steps (long since forgotten) that you had to go through to get Netware to work alongside WIN/TCP for DOS. -Frank McConnell