My next story, The Line That Never Widened, is not a story about artificial intelligence or synthetic personhood. It stands apart from my Sentient Partnership Universe stories.
This is a technological alternate history—a “what if?” built from a paper I wrote years ago.
The story begins in 1995, when Novell faced a critical decision about the future of UnixWare. In our history, Novell sold UNIX to the Santa Cruz Operation and increasingly lost ground to Microsoft. But what if Novell had made a different decision?
What if it had retained UnixWare, released an irrevocably open operating-system foundation, and built its commercial future around the technologies it already understood: directory services, networking, messaging, storage, management, certification, training, and enterprise support?
From that single change, the story follows an alternate path through NDS and eDirectory, GroupWise, Novell Storage Services, Cluster Services, ManageWise, ZENworks, Compaq ProLiant, the Intel server track, DEC Alpha technology, BSD compatibility, and eventually the corporate desktop.
The story is fiction, but the technology and business pressures behind it are real. There are no miraculous inventions and no convenient collapse of every competitor. Microsoft does not disappear. Linux still exists. BSD continues along its own path. Novell must still earn every partner, customer, certification, and product success.
The difference is that one strategic decision prevents an opening from becoming a wedge—and the line never widens.
This story will be of particular interest to:
Former and current Novell administrators, CNEs, resellers, and Partners.
UNIX and BSD administrators and developers.
People who worked with NetWare, GroupWise, NDS/eDirectory, UnixWare, Compaq ProLiant, DEC Alpha, or early Windows NT.
Systems administrators, network engineers, enterprise architects, and IT consultants.
Retrocomputing enthusiasts and readers interested in computer history.
Alternate-history readers who enjoy plausible stories built around the question, “What if one decision had changed?”
Business readers interested in corporate strategy, platform economics, licensing, partnerships, and the decisions that determine whether a technology company survives or fails.
You do not need to have worked with Novell to follow the story. The technical history provides the setting, but the novel is ultimately about people making difficult decisions without knowing what the next twenty years will bring.
For those who remember this era, some of the names will feel like meeting old colleagues. For everyone else, it is a look at a future the computer industry came surprisingly close to having.
The Line That Never Widened
A Novel of the UNIX Road Not Taken
by Alexander Winston