PATHWORKS (copyright requires all letters capitalized) was the trade name used by

Digital Equipment Corporation Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC ), using the trademark Digital, was a major American company in the computer industry from the 1960s to the 1990s. The company was co-founded by Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson in 1957. Olsen was president until ...

of Maynard,

Massachusetts Massachusetts ( ; ), officially the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, is a U.S. state, state in the New England region of the Northeastern United States. It borders the Atlantic Ocean and the Gulf of Maine to its east, Connecticut and Rhode ...

for a series of programs that eased the interoperation of Digital's

minicomputer A minicomputer, or colloquially mini, is a type of general-purpose computer mostly developed from the mid-1960s, built significantly smaller and sold at a much lower price than mainframe computers . By 21st century-standards however, a mini is ...

s and servers with

personal computer A personal computer, commonly referred to as PC or computer, is a computer designed for individual use. It is typically used for tasks such as Word processor, word processing, web browser, internet browsing, email, multimedia playback, and PC ...

s. It was available for both PC and Mac systems, with support for

MS-DOS MS-DOS ( ; acronym for Microsoft Disk Operating System, also known as Microsoft DOS) is an operating system for x86-based personal computers mostly developed by Microsoft. Collectively, MS-DOS, its rebranding as IBM PC DOS, and a few op ...

OS/2 OS/2 is a Proprietary software, proprietary computer operating system for x86 and PowerPC based personal computers. It was created and initially developed jointly by IBM and Microsoft, under the leadership of IBM software designer Ed Iacobucci, ...

and

Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

on the PC. Before it was named PATHWORKS, it was known as PCSA (Personal Computing Systems Architecture). PATHWORKS server ran on

OpenVMS OpenVMS, often referred to as just VMS, is a multi-user, multiprocessing and virtual memory-based operating system. It is designed to support time-sharing, batch processing, transaction processing and workstation applications. Customers using Op ...

and

Ultrix Ultrix (officially all-caps ULTRIX) is the brand name of Digital Equipment Corporation's (DEC) discontinued native Unix operating systems for the PDP-11, VAX, MicroVAX and DECstations. History The initial development of Unix occurred on DEC eq ...

(and later Digital UNIX) and enabled a system or cluster to act as a file and

print server In computer networking, a print server, or printer server, is a type of server that connects printers to client computers over a network. It accepts print jobs from the computers and sends the jobs to the appropriate printers, queuing the jobs ...

for client

IBM PC compatible An IBM PC compatible is any personal computer that is hardware- and software-compatible with the IBM Personal Computer (IBM PC) and its subsequent models. Like the original IBM PC, an IBM PC–compatible computer uses an x86-based central p ...

and

Macintosh Mac is a brand of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple since 1984. The name is short for Macintosh (its official name until 1999), a reference to the McIntosh (apple), McIntosh apple. The current product lineup inclu ...

workstations. A version of PATHWORKS server for OS/2 was also available, allowing a PC with OS/2 to act as a server to other PCs. PATHWORKS server was derived from LanMan/X, the portable version of

LAN Manager LAN Manager is a discontinued network operating system (NOS) available from multiple vendors and developed by Microsoft in cooperation with 3Com Corporation. It was designed to succeed 3Com's 3+Share network server software which ran atop a h ...

. PATHWORKS was one of DEC's most successful products ever. Analysis of sales showed that on average, each PATHWORKS license brought in at least $3,000 USD in server revenue (server HW, SW, storage, printers, networking, and services), so it was a major driver for DEC's revenue in the mid and late 1980s. Later versions of PATHWORKS were known as Advanced Server for OpenVMS (or Advanced Server for Unix for

Tru64 Tru64 UNIX is a discontinued 64-bit UNIX operating system for the Alpha instruction set architecture (ISA), currently owned by Hewlett-Packard (HP). Previously, Tru64 UNIX was a product of Compaq, and before that, Digital Equipment Corporation (DE ...

). Advanced Server was replaced on OpenVMS by

Samba Samba () is a broad term for many of the rhythms that compose the better known Brazilian music genres that originated in the Afro-Brazilians, Afro Brazilian communities of Bahia in the late 19th century and early 20th century, It is a name or ...

at the time of the porting of VMS to

Itanium Itanium (; ) is a discontinued family of 64-bit computing, 64-bit Intel microprocessors that implement the Intel Itanium architecture (formerly called IA-64). The Itanium architecture originated at Hewlett-Packard (HP), and was later jointly dev ...

. This was due to the amount of effort required to keep Advanced Server compatible with new versions of Windows and the

Server Message Block Server Message Block (SMB) is a communication protocol used to share files, printers, serial ports, and miscellaneous communications between nodes on a network. On Microsoft Windows, the SMB implementation consists of two vaguely named Windows ...

(SMB) protocol.

Features

Once installed onto the PCs, the PATHWORKS client provided the following features: *

DECnet DECnet is a suite of network protocols created by Digital Equipment Corporation. Originally released in 1975 in order to connect two PDP-11 minicomputers, it evolved into one of the first peer-to-peer network architectures, thus transforming DEC ...

, and later TCP/IP and NetBEUI, end-node connectivity with the host and client systems * PowerTerm 525

Terminal emulation A terminal emulator, or terminal application, is a computer program that emulates a video terminal within some other display architecture. Though typically synonymous with a shell or text terminal, the term ''terminal'' covers all remote termi ...

software from Ericom * eXcursion, an

X11 The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems. X originated as part of Project Athena at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1984. The X protocol has been at ...

server for Windows. * File-transfer software. This was a DECnet-DOS file transfer utility, although it was somewhat superfluous because the PATHWORKS server software presented VMS or UNIX files to the PC clients as if they were PC files being served by a Windows server. The PATHWORKS server software provided access to server file storage and print services using the native Microsoft protocols. Later versions of PATHWORKS servers on VMS supported NetWare and Macintosh clients, but they never achieved the volumes of the Microsoft clients. For clients running a GUI such as Windows 3.x, additional components available included an

X window system The X Window System (X11, or simply X) is a windowing system for bitmap displays, common on Unix-like operating systems. X originated as part of Project Athena at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1984. The X protocol has been at ...

server, allowing clients to access graphical apps running on VMS or

UNIX Unix (, ; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...

hosts, and clients for DEC's

ALL-IN-1 ALL-IN-1 was an office automation product developed and sold by Digital Equipment Corporation in the 1980s. It was one of the first purchasable off the shelf electronic mail products. It was later known as ''Office Server V3.2 for OpenVMS Alpha a ...

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.

Implementation

LanMan normally ran across

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

'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 In DOS memory management, conventional memory, also called base memory, is the first 640 kilobytes of the memory on IBM PC or compatible systems. It is the read-write memory directly addressable by the processor for use by the operating system ...

for DOS applications to run. To keep a reasonable amount of base memory free mandated the use of QEMM or a similar memory manager. This problem went away once 386-based PCs became prevalent and MS Windows provided built-in support for large amounts of memory.

References

{{reflist OpenVMS software Lawrence W. White - PATHWORKS Product Manager Bob Nusbaum - PATHWORKS Product Manager