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Description: In the late 1980’s the founder of NE2000, Novell, planned on going out of the hardware server business and converting its NetWare operating system into a PC-based server Operating System. This required research on networking technology as well as networking cards for the company come up with protocols and server Operating System.

During this time, the important pieces of the technology that Novell needed were already in the market: Token Ring and Ethernet had already been codified according to the IEEE 802 standards. Although this technology was adopted only in 1990, it had already been in use and the card vendors were already available. However, the vendors of networking hardware as well as the industry leaders IBM and 3Com were selling their hardware at prohibitively high prices.

To fight the competition in the market, Novell decided to come up with his own cards. His goal was to produce these cards at minimal Research & Development, engineering and manufacturing costs. To this end, he used a prototype design created by the National Semiconductor using an 8390 Ethernet Chip. As the National Semiconductor had no worries about Novell using the design, his venture turned very profitable. However, Novell’s design was only intended to a proof-of-concept prototype as it only implemented a very little functionality. The original card he manufactured included the NE2000 and the initial one, the NE1000, both used the thin Ethernet. The NE2000, however, had been revised and became the NE2000T with an added built-in support for 10Base-T. The NE in the NE2000 indicated the Novell Ethernet.

The NE2000 card was released and distributed through Novell, Inc.'s Eagle subsidiary. The company sold the cards with very little or no profits. While they were criticized for poor performance, their guaranteed compatibility with NetWare assured their sale. Companies using NetWare LANs with several desktop nodes opted for Novell's cards. This was the time when Novell started making profits which came primarily from sales of NetWare rather than the cards themselves.

The NE2000 cards finally became successful in the market and this prompted the creation of clone cards cottage industry which was compatible with the Novell cards. This led to the separation of the Eagle division. However, the company was bought by Artisoft which, in turn, sold it to Microdyne. The development of the card continued and eventually, the company started producing different versions with further technology improvements, Plug and Play, bus architectures, and network topologies support. Aside from the NetWare, the driver support for the NE2000 cards became available for different kinds of Operating Systems such as Microsoft Windows, DOS, Linux and UNIX.

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