Now available is the preliminary yet fairly complete product specification for the LAN Manager server and workstation from October 14, 1987. This document was available to developers months before any pre-release LAN manager code, and about a year before any LAN Manager 1.0 OEM products became available.
The document was quite a pain to scan, because for some mysterious reason the LAN Manager group decided to print on 9×11″ paper, a size so unusual (despite its nice round dimensions, at least in boutique and obsolete units) that common office equipment cannot deal with it. The scanner I use can run documents up to 8.5″ wide through the automatic feeder, but 9″ simply won’t fit. So I had to scan manually, and lose a few millimeters on each side, which resulted in no loss of actual information.
The print quality was also, shall we say, not very high; finding a line that was not slanted or crooked was a challenge (Acrobat did a decent job de-skewing, so the scan probably looks better than the original).
The product spec does a good job of describing what LAN Manager can do and how it is expected to be used. While a lot of things changed in over 30 years, the NET command has stayed fairly backward compatible.
Note the user named DARRYLR that pops up in examples throughout the document. That’s Darryl Rubin, networking software head at Microsoft and therefore the manager of LAN Manager.
That’s what I call cheap Anti-Piracy measures!