Drew Major, a founder and distinguished engineer at Novell, officially retired from the company at the end of March, a company spokesman confirmed.
Major, considered to be the father of NetWare, retired his Novell shirt to focus his full attention on several startups launched in Utah, including Move Networks, the spokesman said. That South Jordan, Utah-based content distribution company focuses on distributing large objects and files over the Internet.
Major is also working with the CTO of 3Com on a next-generation video server, the spokesman said.
Major began his career with Novell 20 years ago and is widely credited with creating the LAN and fathering Novell's flagship network operating system (NOS), NetWare, with other members of the original Novell "Superset" development team, which included Dale Niebaur and Kyle Powell.
The engineer served as a full-time contractor to Novell for many years and then as an employee from 1993 to 2003, during which he held the title of chief scientist and vice president of advanced development.
Most recently, Major served as CTO of Novell spin-off Volera, which was folded back into the company at the end of 2002.
Drew Major was inducted into CRN's Industry Hall of Fame in 1999 (see linked story).
