Pathworks

Pathworks was the tradename used by Digital Equipment Corporation of Maynard, Massachusetts for a series of programs that eased the interoperation of Digital's minicomputers with personal computers.

The server part of Pathworks ran on VAX/VMS or Ultrix and enabled a DEC VAX or VAXcluster to act as a file and print server for client IBM PC compatible and Macintosh workstations. Pathworks server was derived from LanMan/X, the portable version of OS/2 LAN Manager.

Once installed onto the PCs, the Pathworks client provided the following features:

• DECnet end-node connectivity with the host systems
• PowerTerm 525 Terminal emulation software from Ericom
• File-transfer software

For clients running a GUI such as Windows 3.x, additional components available included an X window system server, allowing clients to access graphical apps running on VMS or UNIX hosts, and clients for DEC's ALL-IN-1 email and groupware system. Although primitive by modern standards, Pathworks was very sophisticated for its time; far more than just a file and print server, it made client microcomputers into terminals and workstations on a DEC network.

LanMan normally ran across Microsoft's basic, non-routable NetBIOS/NetBEUI NBF protocol, but Pathworks included a DECnet stack, including layers like the LAT transport used for terminal sessions. The complexity of DECnet by 1980s PC standards meant that the Pathworks client was a huge software stack to have resident in MS-DOS; configuring the Pathworks client was a complex task, made more so by the need to preserve enough Conventional memory for DOS applications to run. To keep a reasonable amount of base memory free mandated the use of QEMM or a similar memory manager.

Pathworks was available for both Windows and Mac computer systems.

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