Flowers Galore

Also, IBM was still big on mainframes and PCs, and OS/2 of course, and hadn’t really that much interest in Netware or Windows then (outsourcing deals aside). Apple was even way farther away from that, completely on their own OS and Appletalk, directories were not really useful for their users then.

Netware 4 was utter garbage. It was horribly buggy if you got it to install. Admins hated it, and then win2k peeped around the corner.

You mean Novell royally fucked up Netware and people went to AD at first because of that. But yes, AD was quite new then, mostly an add-on for NT domains (and still sort of is :) try going full kerberos…).