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.
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.
Cool! I have fond memories of installing the TCPIP stack on top of Warp with a six(?) disk set.
As a teenager I had a PS/2 with a token ring card and an additional serial ports card. OS/2 let us run a PPP server for Winsock clients. We used it for Quake and other lan games.
I remember installing a horribly expensive Ethernet card on an Altos SCO Xenix box, which required recompiling the kernel to install the drivers (on 5 inch floppies). I was convinced this would never work, but magically it did! Things were a lot tougher back in those days.
Oh, and Token Ring, where you could almost see the token crawling around the ring, like an arthritic snail.
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.