Banyan Systems

Banyan Systems was founded in 1983 by Anand Jagannathan, a software engineer and mid-level manager at Data General, Larry Floryan and David C. Mahoney. The company's distinctive logo, a Banyan tree, and the logo's allegorical representation of Banyan's product suite, VINES, were conceived by Jagannathan.

Jim Allchin, although not a founder, was one of the first employees hired. Allchin was finishing his PhD when David Mahoney approached him to join Banyan. David Mahoney also hired two other key engineers from Data General: Dean Polnerow and Bob Nuber. Anand Jagannathan, Jim Allchin, Larry Floryan, Dean Polnerow and Bob Nuber were the engineering core team.

The company was headquartered on Flanders Road in Westboro, Massachusetts, along the I-495 corridor, which was well known in the 1980s as the high-tech center of the U.S. East Coast. Other companies that flourished along the I-495 corridor during that time period were Data General, Digital Equipment Corporation, Proteon, Raytheon, and Wang Laboratories.

Banyan Systems created a distributed Network Operating System (NOS) called VINES, an acronym which stood for VIrtual NEtworking System. The NOS allowed workgroups of IBM-compatible personal computers to connect to network servers via Ethernet or Token Ring networks, similar to functionality provided by other NOS products such as Novell NetWare and 3Com 3+Share/3+Open.

VINES was unique at the time, because it went a step further - it allowed the network servers to interconnect, forming large corporate networks out of interconnected work groups. VINES accomplished this through a proprietary replicated directory service called StreetTalk. VINES also had the first integrated, enterprise-wide distributed email system for microcomputers, known as VINES Mail. Like all resources in the VINES environment, it used the StreetTalk directory service. VINES Mail was more advanced and easier to use than almost any other mail package on the market. The first VINES product was released in late 1984.

Banyan's NOS was built on AT&T's UNIX System V Release 3 (SVR3); however, the UNIX kernel was protected from access by anyone but Banyan personnel. Server operation and NOS management were all menu-driven (unlike the products from VINES competitors, which were command-line driven), and root access passwords were a closely guarded corporate secret. The first versions of the NOS ran on a proprietary Motorola 68000-based server built by Banyan, known as the Banyan Network Server (BNS).

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