Banyan VINES

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~ the obituary ~

vines never reached me. it was an enterprise and government-coded product, sold to fortune 500 networking departments and the us department of defense, not to teenagers in ankara with a dial-up account. in '99 when banyan was winding down the vines line, i was 15 and the network operating system question was not on my desk. ttnet gave you ppp over the modem and that was the only stack i had to think about.

banyan systems incorporated in westboro massachusetts in 1983, founded by three ex-data general engineers, anand jagannathan and larry floryan and david c. mahoney. mahoney raised two and a half million in venture from greylock within forty days of leaving data general. vines shipped in october 1984 as a virtual networking system for ibm pcs, built on top of xerox xns protocols with a unix server kernel underneath.

the killer feature was streettalk, a globally consistent directory service that let any user log in from any banyan-connected office in the world and see the same name space. nothing else in the 1980s did that. by 1989 vines was the sixth-largest enterprise lan os, and the marine corps was running its global communications on banyan boxes by 1988. the system was running the marine corps logistics network through the 1990-91 gulf war. it was the kind of installation that did not show up in pc magazine reviews.

~ the case file ~

~ what it actually did ~

vines ran on a server appliance, originally banyan's own hardware and later commodity x86 boxes, with the vines kernel on top of a stripped-down unix. clients on dos and windows 3.1 logged into streettalk with a fully qualified name like userid@office@organization. the directory replicated across every server in the deployment, so a treasury employee in washington and a treasury employee in london saw the same list of resources after a sync.

this was 1985. microsoft was still shipping ms-dos 3 and would not have an active directory equivalent for fifteen years. novell netware did not have a real distributed directory until netware 4 in 1993. banyan was alone at the top of that hill for almost a decade. the customers who bought in were the ones running thousands of users across continents, departments of state and treasury and defense, large oil companies, the marine corps. small and mid offices bought novell or lantastic. banyan owned the upper tier.

~ the slide ~

banyan made two business calls that hurt it. the system stayed closed, with hardware vendors required to submit drivers for banyan to write the device support themselves. that worked when banyan was the only directory game in town. it stopped working when novell and microsoft opened up their driver models to third parties. the second call was sticking with the xns and proprietary protocols when tcp/ip was eating the world. by '95 every customer wanted ip-native networking, and banyan had to bolt it on instead of having built it in.

microsoft shipped windows nt server 3.51 in 1995 and nt 4 in 1996 with the same workstation everyone already had on their desk. when active directory landed with windows 2000 server in early 2000, banyan's only differentiator was gone. directory replication was now bundled into the os the customer was already buying. the vines install base did not migrate to a newer vines, it migrated off banyan entirely.

~ how it actually ended ~

banyan systems renamed itself to banyan worldwide in 1997 to signal a shift away from the network os business and toward services. the rebrand to ePresence in october 1999 was the cleanly-dead moment for vines, the company stopped shipping new versions and the kernel was licensed off to wipro acer for legacy support. ePresence ran as an internet services consultancy for four more years before announcing on october 24 2003 that operations would cease and the assets would go to unisys.

the marine corps migrated off vines in stages through the early 2000s, the last big deployment finally shutting down around 2005. by then the company that wrote it had been gone for half a decade. streettalk had been the right idea ten years too early, in a market where the right idea ten years too early is the same as the wrong idea on the day microsoft ships the same feature for free.

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