SuperSet
Encyclopedia
SuperSet Software was a group founded by friends and former Eyring Research Institute
Eyring Research Institute
Eyring Research Institute was founded as a non-profit organization, on September 6, 1972. in Provo, Utah.-History:Carlyle Harmon established the Eyring Research Institute with Dr. Ronald G. Hansen as President. This Institute did consulting work in various areas of contract research in cooperation...

 (ERI) co-workers Drew Major
Drew Major
Drew Major was one of the founders of Novell and the lead architect and developer of NetWare operating system for over 15 years. In 1981 Drew and his partners Kyle Powell, Dale Neibaur, and Mark Hurst saw value in enabling PCs to share files and other resources via a local area network...

, Dale Neibaur, Kyle Powell and later joined by Mark Hurst. Their work was based on classwork that they started in October 1981 at Brigham Young University
Brigham Young University
Brigham Young University is a private university located in Provo, Utah. It is owned and operated by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints , and is the United States' largest religious university and third-largest private university.Approximately 98% of the university's 34,000 students...

, Provo
Provo, Utah
Provo is the third largest city in the U.S. state of Utah, located about south of Salt Lake City along the Wasatch Front. Provo is the county seat of Utah County and lies between the cities of Orem to the north and Springville to the south...

, Utah, USA, and upon previous work experiences at Eyring Research Institute.

In 1983, Raymond Noorda took over leadership of Novell
Novell
Novell, Inc. is a multinational software and services company. It is a wholly owned subsidiary of The Attachmate Group. It specializes in network operating systems, such as Novell NetWare; systems management solutions, such as Novell ZENworks; and collaboration solutions, such as Novell Groupwise...

 and engaged the work by the SuperSet crew. The team was originally assigned to create a CP/M
CP/M
CP/M was a mass-market operating system created for Intel 8080/85 based microcomputers by Gary Kildall of Digital Research, Inc...

 disk sharing system to help network the CP/M hardware that Novell was selling at the time. The team was privately convinced that CP/M was a doomed platform and instead came up with a successful file sharing system for the newly introduced IBM-compatible PC
IBM PC
The IBM Personal Computer, commonly known as the IBM PC, is the original version and progenitor of the IBM PC compatible hardware platform. It is IBM model number 5150, and was introduced on August 12, 1981...

.

The group also wrote an application called Snipes, a text-mode game and used it to test the new network and demonstrate its capabilities. Along with Spasim
Spasim
Spasim was a 32-player 3D networked computer game by Jim Bowery involving 4 planetary systems with up to 8 players per planetary system, released in March 1974...

 and Maze War
Maze War
Maze War is a video game.Maze War originated or disseminated a number of concepts used in thousands of games to follow, and is considered one of the earliest examples of, or progenitor of, a first-person shooter...

, Snipes was the precursor of many popular multiplayer games such as Doom and Quake.http://www.textmodegames.com/download/snipes.html

This network operating system
Network operating system
A networking operating system , also referred to as the Dialoguer, is the software that runs on a server and enables the server to manage data, users, groups, security, applications, and other networking functions...

 was later called Novell NetWare
Novell NetWare
NetWare is a network operating system developed by Novell, Inc. It initially used cooperative multitasking to run various services on a personal computer, with network protocols based on the archetypal Xerox Network Systems stack....

. It has made a significant contribution to the success of Novell.http://www.novellmuseum.net/history_of_novell_g.htm

ERI to SuperSet and Novell

Dennis Fairclough
Dennis Fairclough
Dennis Fairclough is Deputy Chair/Professor at the Computing & Networking Sciences Department at Utah Valley University. He specializes in teaching Borland C++ Builder and Java....

, Drew Major, Dale Neibaur and Kyle Powell were hired by Eyring Research Institute to work on government contracts from Hill Air Force Base. Their experience and exposure to the technology being programmed for the Software and Intelligent Systems Technology Office (SISTO) and the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPANET
ARPANET
The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network , was the world's first operational packet switching network and the core network of a set that came to compose the global Internet...

) provided opportunities for their ambitions. At Eyring Research Institute these men began developing their ideas for using inexpensive mini-computers networked together to perform big computing tasks.

These four men left their employment with ERI and took with them the experience and technology necessary to start and support the development of Novell. Dennis Fairclough was the member of that original team that started what would become Novell. Drew Major, Dale Neibaur and Kyle Powell went on to form SuperSet. Dennis Fairclough was the original founder of Novell, when Ray Noorda came to Novell Dennis was dismissed in a route to build upon a new future for Novell. Drew Major, Dale Neibaur and Kyle Powell continued to supply support for Novell through their SuperSet Software Group.

Dennis Fairclough, Drew Major, Dale Neibaur and Kyle Powell's work on the Intelligent Systems Technology Project at ERI transferred to Novell important insights from the ARPANET and related developing technologies, insights that would become the foundations of Novell.

"ERI spawned many high-tech spin-offs, including WordPerfect
WordPerfect
WordPerfect is a word processing application, now owned by Corel.Bruce Bastian, a Brigham Young University graduate student, and BYU computer science professor Dr. Alan Ashton joined forces to design a word processing system for the city of Orem's Data General Corp. minicomputer system in 1979...

, Novell, and Dynix in computers and some in the military and communication areas."
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