Novell NetWare has quite a long history, but the older parts of it are now almost completely lost. In the mid-1980s, Novell offered Advanced NetWare, NetWare ELS, NetWare SFT, and other members of the NetWare 286 family.
With the partial exception of so-called non-dedicated NetWare 2.x servers, version 2.x and later of NetWare always had dedicated server machines with clients (called “shell” in the old days, later “workstation”) for DOS, OS/2, Macintosh, and more.

Until the mid-1990s NetWare typically used its own networking protocol called IPX. NetWare networks could use Ethernet, Token-Ring, Arcnet, IBM PC Network, and other physical network layers. In later days, NetWare networks were almost exclusively Ethernet based (as the other technologies died out), and over time increasingly switched to TCP/IP transport.
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