NE2000 - History

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.

To combat this, Novell decided to develop its own line of cards. In order to create these at 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 National Semiconductor chips made the proposal almost pure profit. However, since the design had only been 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; announced as "E-Net adapter" in February 1987 for 495 USD) and NE2000 (16-bit ISA), and the corresponding use of limited 8-bit and later 16-bit DMA in the NE2000 uses thin Ethernet; the second ("B") revision added an Attachment Unit Interface (AUI) port to support a transceiver, and later models NE1000T and NE2000T added built-in 10BASE-T support. The "NE" prefix stood for "Novell Ethernet".

With the launch of the NE1000/2000, Novell took two significant steps.

The first was a program under which other vendors were invited to manufacture the cards with no royalty as "NE1000-compatible" cards. Vendors were required to submit their cards to Novell for certification which focused on whether the standard Novell driver worked with the card. In a sense, this was a first step toward open-source hardware. Interested manufacturers were given a complete package of manufacturing documentation to allow them to start building NE1000/2000 compatible cards without having to do any design work. The primary intent of this program was to drive down the cost of network hardware to promote the adoption of PC networking.

The second innovation taken, primarily to deal with internal management issues, was to allow Novell's distributors to buy the cards directly from its manufacturer, Eagle, a contract manufacturing subsidiary of Anthem Technologies, the industrial distributor which provided the components for the NE1000/2000. Novell received a royalty on each card, but was no longer involved in scheduling and ordering manufacturing.

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 1990s. 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 token ring (championed by IBM), though its main impact was to significantly lower the cost of PC networks.

In 2003 National Semiconductor ceased manufacturing of the 8390 chip.