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The Rabbit and the Ring

GMU RingTwo days ago, the the neighbor’s’ kids came knocking at my door. One of their pet rabbits had escaped and they asked if I could help corral it. Nice guy that I am, I said sure and joined the posse. Well, we finally caught the rabbit and all was well again. Or so I thought. During the chase, I lost my college class ring. The ring always was a bit loose on my finger and it slipped off during the chase. And of course, with all the fallen leaves covering the ground, trying to find it was like looking for the proverbial needle in the haystack.

I seached both their yard and mine to no avail and was about to give up when it occurred to me that it might be a good idea to try using a metal detector to find the ring. Well, I went out and bought one. Armed with this technology, I began sweeping the neighborhood. This went on for two days. And lo and behold, today I actually found the ring.

So, I guess the moral of this story is “Never chase a rabbit without a metal detector.”

Ray Noorda

Ray Noorda, the founder and first CEO of Novell passed away on 9 October 2006. His management acumen and leadership, along with the technical brilliance of Drew Major, Dale Niebaur, Kyle Powell, and Mark Hurst resulted in Novell Netware. Netware was a “Killer App” that had a profound effect on the rest of the IT industry. Netware dominated the LAN space in the late 1980’s and 1990’s.

Unfortunately, Novell was late to the game in realizing that TCP/IP was the wave of the future. They stayed too long with their IPX/SPX protocol, which is quite inefficient in environments other than high-speed LANs. As a result, the various Unix vendors, Microsoft and now Linux eventually overtook them as the major players in the network operatng system space.

But, in its time, Netware was the standard of excellence and a tribute to the “out of the box” thinking of Noorda, Major and others who developed a new technlogy that changed the way we work and think.