
LAN Manager Product Specification, 1987 - kencausey
http://www.os2museum.com/wp/lan-manager-product-specification-1987/
======
TimMurnaghan
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.

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.

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.

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.

~~~
gmueckl
It's not just about security related things. This is generally a danger of
pulling a prank when you're not around to observe how it unfolds. You can't
step in and stop it before it goes down some unexpected side track and
involves too many people.

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ammmir
I never used LANMAN, but the spec makes for some interesting reading...

 _> 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 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!

~~~
djpowell
tip - if you want to cd into a UNC path, you can't; but you can pushd into one
and it'll create a temporary drive letter mapping and unmap it when you popd
out

~~~
mikestew
Where were you and your helpful tips 30 years ago when such knowledge would
have been actually handy? :-) Cool tip, though.

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vmurthy
Direct link to PDF : [http://www.os2museum.com/files/docs/os210sdk/lanman-
prod-spe...](http://www.os2museum.com/files/docs/os210sdk/lanman-prod-
spec-1987.pdf)

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?

------
ai_ja_nai
better late than never

