Novell Embedded Systems Technology

Novell Embedded Systems Technology (NEST) was a series of APIs, data formats and written in a highly portable fashion intended to be used in embedded systems. The idea was to allow various small devices to access Novell NetWare services, provide such services, or use NetWare's IPX protocol as a communications system. Novell referred to this concept as "Extended Networks", and when the effort was launched they boasted that they wanted to see one billion devices connected to NetWare networks by year 2000. NEST was launched in mid-1994, and given the timing it seems its true purpose was as a counter to Microsoft's similar Microsoft at Work efforts, which had been launched in 1993. Neither technology saw any amount of third-party support, although some of NEST's code was apparently re-used in Novell Distributed Print Services (NDPS), and thus iPrint.

NEST consisted primarily of a Novell protocol driver stack implemented in ANSI C. The stack included drivers for then-popular networking hardware, including Ethernet, TokenRing, AppleTalk (actually referring to LocalTalk, a common confusion) and ISDN, as well as higher-level modules for protocols such as Novell's own IPX, and AppleTalk, and later TCP/IP. The NetWare Services Layer added support for application protocols, notably NetWare client services such as file servers and network time synchronization, and the NEST Requester which acted as a pipe-like endpoint for lightweight communications. Orthogonal to these services, NEST also included basic implementations of Novell's PSERVER and NPRINTER servers. Finally, NEST also defined an operating system interface known as POSE (Portable Operating System Extension), which was a thin translation module defining all of the calls NEST needed to support its own functionality, things like memory management and process creation, which the developer ported to the particular platform of interest. NEST was deliberately written to be able to run from ROM without secondary storage (i.e., it had no long-term state it needed to store).

...
Wikipedia