NE2000

The NE1000/NE2000 is an early line of low cost Ethernet network cards originally produced by Novell. Its popularity had a significant impact on the pervasiveness of networks in computing. They are based on a National Semiconductor prototype design using their 8390 Ethernet chip.

History

In the late 1980s, 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 physical 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 committee — 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.