NE2000
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The NE2000 was a highly-successful line of ISA network cards originally produced by Novell.
[edit] History
In the late 1980's, Novell was looking to shed its hardware server business and transform its flagship NetWare product into a PC-based server operating system that was agnostic and independent of the network implementation and topology (Novell even referred to NetWare as a NOS, or network operating system). To do this, Novell needed networking technology in general-- and networking cards in particular-- to become a commodity, so that the server operating system and protocols would become the differentiating technology.
Most of the key pieces of this strategy were already in place: Ethernet and Token-Ring (among others) had been codified by the IEEE 802 standards (the draft was not formally adopted until 1990, but was already in widespread use, and cards from one vendor were, on the whole, wire-compatible with cards complying with the same 802 working group). However, networking hardware vendors in general, and industry leaders 3Com and IBM in particular, were charging high prices for their hardware.
To combat this, Novell decided to develop its own line of cards. To produce these at a minimal R&D, engineering and production costs, Novell simply implemented, almost verbatim, a prototype design created by National Semiconductor using the 8390 Ethernet chip. National Semiconductor, for its part, had no qualms about the use of the design; the use of NatSemi chips made the proposal almost pure profit. However, since the design was only intended as a proof-of-concept prototype, it implemented bare-minimum functionality: PIO was used instead of DMA, no buffering was provided, and no provision was made for the use of a transceiver. The original cards, the NE1000 (8-bit ISA) and NE2000 (16-bit ISA), used thin Ethernet; later models NE1000T and NE2000T added 10Base-T support. The "NE" prefix indicated "Novell Ethernet".
Novell released the cards through its Eagle subsidiary, and sold them for little to no profit. The cards were widely criticized for poor performance, but for organizations rolling out NetWare LANs with hundreds or thousands of desktop nodes, the cost savings afforded by Novell's cards (they were as little as 25% of the cost of competitive cards), combined with guaranteed NetWare compatibility, made them an easy choice. Novell, for its part, made its profit from the sales of NetWare, which was licensed on a per-node, per-server model; thus, it could afford to sell the cards themselves at zero profit, knowing that every card sold virtually guaranteed a corresponding NetWare node license.
The success of the cards prompted the creation of a cottage industry of clone cards, which were compatible (to varying degrees) with Novell's cards. Novell eventually spun off the Eagle division as a separate company, Anthem Technologies, which was later bought by Artisoft, then sold to Microdyne. These companies continued to develop enhanced versions of the cards, producing versions with technology improvements (e.g. DMA/bus mastering, buffering), Plug and Play, and support for other network topologies (e.g. Token Ring, 100Mbps Ethernet) and bus architectures (e.g. EISA, PCI, PCMCIA). Besides NetWare, driver support for these cards was (and still is) available for a variety of operating systems, including DOS, Microsoft Windows, UNIX, and Linux.
The NE1000/NE2000 line is notable from an historic standpoint, partly for its success as a technology, but more for its success at achieving its original goals: making networking ubiquitous by bringing implementation costs down. In order to remain competitive with Novell's bargain-price cards, 3Com and other vendors were forced to cut the pricing of their entry-level network cards, contributing greatly to the networking boom of the 1990's. To a lesser extent, it is arguable that the success of the NE1000/2000 cards helped to tip the scale of the "LAN wars" in favor of Ethernet (championed by 3Com) over technically-superior Token Ring (championed by IBM).
