Pathworks was the tradename used by Digital Equipment Corporation

Digital Equipment Corporation

Digital Equipment Corporation was a major American company in the computer industry and a leading vendor of computer systems, software and peripherals from the 1960s to the 1990s...

 of Maynard

Maynard, Massachusetts

Maynard is a town in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. As of the 2010 census, the town population was 10,106.- History :Maynard, located on the Assabet River, was incorporated as an independent municipality in 1871. Prior to that it was known as 'Assabet Village' but was legally...

, Massachusetts

Massachusetts

The Commonwealth of Massachusetts is a state in the New England region of the northeastern United States of America. It is bordered by Rhode Island and Connecticut to the south, New York to the west, and Vermont and New Hampshire to the north; at its east lies the Atlantic Ocean. As of the 2010...

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

Minicomputer

A minicomputer is a class of multi-user computers that lies in the middle range of the computing spectrum, in between the largest multi-user systems and the smallest single-user systems...

s with personal computer

Personal computer

A personal computer is any general-purpose computer whose size, capabilities, and original sales price make it useful for individuals, and which is intended to be operated directly by an end-user with no intervening computer operator...

s.

The server part of Pathworks ran on VAX/VMS or Ultrix

Ultrix

Ultrix was the brand name of Digital Equipment Corporation's native Unix systems. While ultrix is the Latin word for avenger, the name was chosen solely for its sound.-History:...

 and enabled a DEC VAX

VAX

VAX was an instruction set architecture developed by Digital Equipment Corporation in the mid-1970s. A 32-bit complex instruction set computer ISA, it was designed to extend or replace DEC's various Programmed Data Processor ISAs...

 or VAXcluster to act as a file and print server for client IBM PC compatible

IBM PC compatible

IBM PC compatible computers are those generally similar to the original IBM PC, XT, and AT. Such computers used to be referred to as PC clones, or IBM clones since they almost exactly duplicated all the significant features of the PC architecture, facilitated by various manufacturers' ability to...

 and Macintosh workstations. Pathworks server was derived from LanMan/X, the portable version of OS/2

OS/2

OS/2 is a computer operating system, initially created by Microsoft and IBM, then later developed by IBM exclusively. The name stands for "Operating System/2," because it was introduced as part of the same generation change release as IBM's "Personal System/2 " line of second-generation personal...

 LAN Manager

LAN Manager

LAN Manager was a Network Operating System 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 heavily modified version of MS-DOS.-Development history:LAN Manager was...

.

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

• DECnet
  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 into a networking powerhouse in the 1980s...
  
   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

X Window System

The X window system is a computer software system and network protocol that provides a basis for graphical user interfaces and rich input device capability for networked computers...

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

Unix

Unix is a multitasking, multi-user computer operating system originally developed in 1969 by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs, including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Brian Kernighan, Douglas McIlroy, and Joe Ossanna...

 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

Microsoft

Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...

's basic, non-routable NetBIOS/NetBEUI

NetBIOS

NetBIOS is an acronym for Network Basic Input/Output System. It provides services related to the session layer of the OSI model allowing applications on separate computers to communicate over a local area network. As strictly an API, NetBIOS is not a networking protocol...

 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

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 usable by the operating system and application programs...

 for DOS applications to run. To keep a reasonable amount of base memory free mandated the use of QEMM

QEMM

Quarterdeck Expanded Memory Manager , was a memory manager produced by Quarterdeck Office Systems in the late 1980s through late 1990s. It was the most popular memory manager for the MS-DOS and other DOS operating systems.-QEMM product ranges:QRAM: A memory manager for 286 or higher CPU. It...

 or a similar memory manager

Memory manager

In IBM PC compatible computing, DOS memory management refers to software and techniques employed to give applications access to more than 640K of "conventional memory". The 640kB limit was specific to the IBM PC and close compatibles; other machines running MS-DOS had different limits, for example...

.

Pathworks was available for both Windows and Mac computer systems.