Drew Major

"Drew personally architected the LAN industry. He is the inventor of the LAN market. It's roughly equivalent to inventing the Web because it enabled a whole new industry," maintains Major's current boss, Novell Chief Executive Eric Schmidt. "He literally wrote half the code in NetWare."

Sixteen years ago, Novell's former chief executive Raymond Noorda bet his career on the hunch that the Superset crew,Major and his former Brigham Young University buds, Dale Niebaur and Kyle Powell,had the right stuff. The crew, which originally was assigned to create a CPM disk sharing system, came up with something else: a file sharing system for the newly introduced IBM-compatible PC.

It was a good roll of the dice. "When I was asked to evaluate coming on at Novell, I was not overly excited at the opportunity at first," said Noorda, who bought the sinking Novell Data Systems in 1982 and saved it from certain death. "After meeting Drew Major and the rest of the Superset team, I decided to make the investment. Much of Novell's past success technologically can be attributed to the Superset team. In my opinion, Drew Major has made a significant contribution to Novell and our industry," Noorda said.

Since the company's founding, Major has remained Novell's top technology gun, first as a full-time contractor,a partnership that lasted until 1993,and as a company employee for the past seven years. Major programs primarily in C, which alone is credited with coding many of the components that define the NOS: the thread scheduler, the file system, file cache and the first DOS redirector, the latter acknowledged as a significant feat by Microsoft Chairman and Chief Executive Bill Gates. Major also was the driving force behind NetWare 386 and System Fault Tolerant capabilities.

For a man who never fully bought into the tag "network operating system," Major is most proud of the simplicity and speed of NetWare. His passion remains developing "fast code that does the job," Major said, proudly noting that the code path for each NetWare upgrade,until version 4.0,shrunk while processor speeds increased by orders of magnitude. Today, NetWare 5.0, sans Novell Directory Services and additional components, is a mere 863,000 lines of code, a tiny fraction of the 30 million line footprint of Windows 2000, according to Novell.

"Drew Major is one of the brightest men in our industry. I know of no other engineer who can squeeze more performance out of so few lines of code," said Ransom Love, president and chief executive of Caldera Systems Inc., Orem, Utah, and a former Novell executive. "He makes computer science a work of optimization art. By pushing the performance envelope, he has helped shape an industry that would have been much the poorer for his absence."

Schmidt agreed. "[Major] is the Seymour Cray of networks. Every system Drew builds is the fastest ever in networking software. Since I've come here, he has built the world's fastest caching solutions."

As Novell's current chief scientist and vice president of advanced development, Major has enormous influence over strategy and product direction at the company. His recent achievements include bringing Java into NetWare, CORBA/distributed object work, Border Manager intranet/Internet products and the company's recently unveiled Internet Appliance and iChain Internet initiatives.

Yet, Major never strays too far from the 40-member development team he oversees. "Drew is the intellectual leader of thousands of engineers in the company and thousands outside the company, and he's always a good predictor of what's to come," Schmidt said, fully crediting his technology chief with the concept of the Network Appliance, which is expected to stimulate a multibillion-dollar business for Novell in the new millennium. "He is the author of that strategy."

A husband and father of four boys, Major is intensely private and tries hard to balance work life and home life. He arrives home each night roughly at 6 p.m., participates in soccer and scouting activities and is active in the Latter-day Saints church. But he acknowledges he still pulls the occasional all-nighter coding.

However, Debbie Steiner, Major's office manager and administrator for 13 years, said her former boss never totally plugs out. "I think he codes in his sleep," she said, adding Major tosses down a lot of pizza and paces quite a bit, rubbing his hands together when engaged in thought. "Drew's best ideas seem to come in the middle of the night; big brain dumps through E-mail at 2 or 3 in the morning are not uncommon, and when he's coding, you may as well be talking to a wall because he doesn't hear you."

Major, modest and unassuming, does not brush off Novell's past woes and the real threat Windows 2000 imposes on the company's NetWare franchise. He uses them,foibles and threats alike,to shape a new, more successful identity for Novell built on the Network Appliance, zeroing in on the layer between the OS and the router. By exploiting Novell's rich networking technologies for the Internet, and making them available to non-NetWare shops, Major is confident his employer will grow and prosper.

As Microsoft's Windows 2000 is set for release in the first quarter of next year, Major draws a philosophical breath, readily dismissing those who see it as a death warrant for Novell.

"Novell as a company has always worked with our backs against the wall. We're most comfortable in the position we're in,with Microsoft as a fierce competitor. I've lived in that world now for 18 years now and it's very comfortable. We're the only major survivor."