I worked at 3Com in the mid 1980's. We had a smart guy (Stanford grad) working in manufacturing that was doing numerical analysis on failure rates and product returns. His analysis showed that the 3c50x PC Ethernet cards almost never failed and built a case for offering a lifetime warranty. He calculated that it would cost the company almost nothing to offer the warranty.
They were high-quality cards and the lifetime warranty proved to be very popular.
The Computer History Museum has a nice two-part oral history of Bob Metcalf (3Com founder and co-inventor of Ethernet) back in 2006: https://youtube.com/watch?v=zKz07DdaKzw
Metcalfe has a reputation for being brash and outspoken and it clearly shows in the interview. I think it served him well in business and later in life as a pundit. I remember looking forward to his columns in InfoWorld, though I didn't necessarily give much stock to his predictions.
He talks a little bit about the downfall of 3Com in the interview, though he begs-off of talking about things that happened there after he left.
I very much enjoyed the trivia and minutiae about the creation of Ethernet and the Digital / Intel / Xerox relationship that ultimately resulted in it being standardized.
Basically, it was a long listen but there was some good stuff in there.
It was great to work with Metcalfe. I have two funny stories to share.
I was on the Macintosh network os client team. For whatever reason (maybe he was annoyed that Apple copied so much from Xerox) Metcalfe didn't like Macs. In this era Macs used Apple's proprietary AppleTalk/LocalTalk network. We did a demo for 3Com execs using a large external monitor connected via a single black coax cable that looked just like thin-ethernet. He got excited for a moment and came right over to look at the Mac and was very disappointed to see the cable attached to a display! (3Com was working on Ethernet cards for Mac at the time but they weren't ready at the time of this demo.)
For those too young to remember: there was an SF Bay Area baseball park known as Candlestick Park that was briefly branded "3Com Park" -- to the great annoyance of SF Giants fans. During one interview he as asked if in the early days of 3Com he would have done anything differently. He said, "I would have named the company 'Candlestick'!"
I remember those days, with Computer Currents' "Year of the LAN" parody predictions repeated year after year. Macs with PhoneNET definitely made it easier and cheaper in the beginning.
ep0: 3c509 in test mode. Erase pencil mark! This means that someone has
scribbled with pencil in the test area on the card. Erase the pencil
mark and reboot. (This is not a joke).
It is the user’s responsibility (with help from the configuration program) to avoid configuring the boot PROM on the adapter in such a way that the system is not able to boot. If this does occur, you can manually jump the Test Via using a #2 pencil. The Test Via forces the adapter into test mode, which disables the boot PROM so that the adapter configuration program can be run. You must cover the designated area thoroughly with the pencil mark.
Test mode forces the adapter not to perform the Automatic Initialization sequence, which means the EEPROM is not read and the adapter is left in the following configuration:
■ Address Configuration register = 0000h
■ Resource Configuration register = 0000h
■ Product ID register = 0000h
Test mode also shortens the ID sequence to 8 bytes (first is still FFh and last is 69h) and forces it to the active state (that is, the adapter is active and will respond to I/O cycles at base address 0200h even without going through the ID sequence).
After you are done, thoroughly erase the pencil mark.
I have a very personal connection with 3com, though it was in the late 90s.
Ron Crane which was 3com's 4th employee and designed the 3C100, 3com's first ethernet product. Many years later he hired me for my first real job of out school and brought me to the bay area. I then got to work side by side with him and David Boggs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Boggs). At the time I never realized how special working with these two were...wasn't every company in the bay area like this?
I stayed in tough with Ron Crane until his death in 2017. He was both brilliant and incredibly sweet. He was so proud to take me behind the scenes at the Computer History Museum to show some work he'd been going.
One day, Ron (a hardware engineer from Xerox) gave a talk about the theoretical performance of an Ethernet file transfer. He calculated the end-to-end latency and data-rate including disk latency, network latency, the number of clock cycles necessary to send and receive the data, etc.
He had (overhead project) slides that showed all his assumptions and calculations.
Finally he displayed a slide with a graph showing this theoretical maximum, the actual performance of the 3Com network stack, and (IIRC) the Novell stack. As I recall, actual performance was about an order-of-magnitude lower than the theoretical max.
His point wasn't that our software division should be able to achieve the theoretical max. It was that if we (for example) got halfway there, we would know that Novell would never ship software that was twice as fast as ours.
He was very nice and scholarly about it and did not mean offense. I and many others weren't offended. But a surprising number of people were.
Prior to the time period covered in the article, 3Com had a major disaster in Software. We were losing badly in competition with Novell in the Network Operating System category (though I and others would argue we had a technically superior product) and decided that we would partner with Microsoft and overpower Novell that way. Big mistake.
I was only a consultant at 3Com during this time, so I may have some of the details wrong, but 3Com essentially bet the success of its software division on the partnership. We built a product called 3+Open that was based on OS/2 Lan Manager. The product flopped. But unfortunately 3Com had agreed to multi-million-dollar, fixed annual license payments to Microsoft for OS/2. (Which may have been the right choice had the product been successful.)
To get out of the license payments, 3Com gave all its LAN software IP to Microsoft and exited that business. Microsoft used that technology in Windows NT Lan Manager and essentially destroyed Novell.
If you want details, the Bill Gates Biography "Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire" tells the story of that failed partnership.
I worked at Convergent Technologies at the time, and our CEO went on a vacation cruise and met Metcalf. They decided over drinks with little umbrellas in them, to merge our companies. We were the largest single customer of Intel processors at the time(the PC market was very fragmented).
But the stocks jiggled and the buyout plan was postponed when valuations became uneven, and it never happened.
They made good stuff. Then the cheap stuff got good enough for 90 percent of the use cases, then they bought into another sector where exactly the same thing happened again, except it was also a completely dead end. I don’t think any peripheral-card-only makers survived except Nvidia
network cards mostly died when it got integrated into the motherboard - same with soundcards and even graphic cards unless you wanted pro quality sound, extra networking features or a gamer. For everybody else, the basic integrated options were enough. I grew up in that era and not once did I look up what the 3com card offered over another networking card other than 10/100. Just wanted it to work. I'm sure some people are more discerning but not much.
There were some “interesting” issues with a lot of the cheap hardware for a long time though. A classic example was the WinModem. A fast modem for cheap? Sure! But it was cheap because it outsourced a lot of its processing to the CPU, so if your system was loaded up (in the day when CPUs were almost all single-core) meant there wasn’t enough left over to process inbound data in realtime which meant dropped packets and retries and horrendous lag and throughput.
Standard wisdom was to use an Intel EtherExpress Pro card for a long time after onboard Ethernet was available. Lots of server hardware had unused builtin NICs until they got decent.
3com was the very first investment I ever bought…I bought my shares on Thursday October 15th, 1987….those that are old enough to remember will know how that turned out.
I can maybe do you one better. I think my first investment was 140 shares of LNUX at F&F IPO pricing of $30/share, purchased Dec, 1999. It opened at $299/share the day of the IPO. Should've sold that day. Eventually sold it all in 2004 for $2.80/share.
I installed a bunch of 3Server network servers in the late 80s-mid 90s. They were pretty darned solid. Tech support was an actual human, I knew his name (though have forgotten it now), and we actually went out to lunch one time, as my company was in Mt View and they were in Santa Clara, I think.
I can't quite remember if the 3c509, 595 or 905 was the fastest and best. I think 905. I created a boot disc for these and a few other NICs that featured on Novell's Cool Solutions.
3c509 was 10base-T ISA, so it's the slowest. 3c595 and 3c905 are 10/100 PCI cards, but the 905 was newer and more efficient (better bus mastering, more CPU offload)
I bought a 3c595 FastEtherlink card from CompUSA when I was in college because my dorm had ethernet and I was running FreeBSD and I thought tech specs were the be-all end-all.
It was fast, but not noticeably faster than any other cards my friends had. Except I spent way too much on mine.
(2022) Yeah.. I know, it says 2026 at the top, but it was posted here in 2025, and you can see it's older. No idea why the author keeps ever-greening (the create date should at least reflect the original post?)
What happened to them? They never really diversified out of network cards, their cards were very very good, but for most people paying 3x as much wasn't worth it.
They split off their Palm (PalmPilot) division in 2000 to focus on Network equipment. The the .com bust happened.
Palm/Handspring/Treo could have been the iPhone, if they'd been better managed.
I had a Treo fairly early on. Leave aside the physical keyboard. The iPhone had a whole app and media infrastructure built around it. Could Palm have gone there? Possibly. But that would have been a big step from where they were in the mid/late 2000s.
but the windows phone OS was better, and the hardware very good. They just couldn't get their shit together with the app ecosystem; even paying us devs huge premiums to write apps wasn't enough.
>The first thing that happened was 3Com walked away from its enterprise networking equipment business. Admittedly Cisco was hard to compete with. But 3Com was the only brand succeeding at doing it.
I can't really agree with that because 3com never had a serious router product line. They had LAN switching equipment and NICs. There was nothing like a whole product line of routers that could take a full BGP table in the 1999-2000-2001 era, and certainly nothing like medium to large carrier routers. I'm talking about around the same era when the Juniper M40 was released to compete with Cisco in that market. Or a Cisco 12008. Anything broadly along those lines. 3Com was far behind in advanced IP routing and things that would serve as like a metro aggregation router or core router.
I am sure that the built-in Intel Ethernet ports on most motherboards have made Network Cards obsolete at least for the Home Market. When I got a 2Wire DSL modem, they threw in an Intel Ethernet card with it for free. Now I use WIFI 6 on my Wifi router and PC, and it is fast enough for me.
I remember when USRobotics was giving away free 56Kbps modems to BBSes if the SYSOP listed that they had a USRobotics modem and kept the BBS up for 24 hours a day.
> I am sure that the built-in Intel Ethernet ports on most motherboards have made Network Cards obsolete at least for the Home Market.
Someone is still making a NIC chip, they're just selling it to the motherboard OEM, instead of selling an add-in board to the customer (or selling a chip to the add-in maker). In a way, this is more sales, because desktops tend to come with a wired nic and a wireless nic, and so do good laptops.
You are understating how integrated this stuff is. If you make an Intel client motherboard, all you need to add for the network is the phy, jack and some passives.
I haven't really been following intel boards. AM4/AM5 chipsets (and cpus) don't have integrated MACs. I didn't realize intel was putting them in for client parts (Xeon-D had them, but Xeon-D is weird :p)
I worked at 3Com in the mid 1980's. We had a smart guy (Stanford grad) working in manufacturing that was doing numerical analysis on failure rates and product returns. His analysis showed that the 3c50x PC Ethernet cards almost never failed and built a case for offering a lifetime warranty. He calculated that it would cost the company almost nothing to offer the warranty.
They were high-quality cards and the lifetime warranty proved to be very popular.
I have such fond memories of the 3c509 cards...
Back in the pre plug and play days, they were one of the few that would just always work.
That sounds like a nice scam.
It came with the card. They said “if you buy this, it’ll last forever, at our expense”.
That sounds like a stupid scam unless you’re super confident in your product.
What happens to such promises when the company is consumed by another? I assume HP is still on the line for it.
HP used to provide lifetime warranties of their own branded gear, so they probably weren't too concerned with it.
The Computer History Museum has a nice two-part oral history of Bob Metcalf (3Com founder and co-inventor of Ethernet) back in 2006: https://youtube.com/watch?v=zKz07DdaKzw
For those with textual proclivities: https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Oral_Hist...
Metcalfe has a reputation for being brash and outspoken and it clearly shows in the interview. I think it served him well in business and later in life as a pundit. I remember looking forward to his columns in InfoWorld, though I didn't necessarily give much stock to his predictions.
He talks a little bit about the downfall of 3Com in the interview, though he begs-off of talking about things that happened there after he left.
I very much enjoyed the trivia and minutiae about the creation of Ethernet and the Digital / Intel / Xerox relationship that ultimately resulted in it being standardized.
Basically, it was a long listen but there was some good stuff in there.
It was great to work with Metcalfe. I have two funny stories to share.
I was on the Macintosh network os client team. For whatever reason (maybe he was annoyed that Apple copied so much from Xerox) Metcalfe didn't like Macs. In this era Macs used Apple's proprietary AppleTalk/LocalTalk network. We did a demo for 3Com execs using a large external monitor connected via a single black coax cable that looked just like thin-ethernet. He got excited for a moment and came right over to look at the Mac and was very disappointed to see the cable attached to a display! (3Com was working on Ethernet cards for Mac at the time but they weren't ready at the time of this demo.)
For those too young to remember: there was an SF Bay Area baseball park known as Candlestick Park that was briefly branded "3Com Park" -- to the great annoyance of SF Giants fans. During one interview he as asked if in the early days of 3Com he would have done anything differently. He said, "I would have named the company 'Candlestick'!"
Ha! He makes the Candlestick remark in this interview too.
> though I didn't necessarily give much stock to his predictions.
Every year that I worked at 3Com, we proclaimed it was "the Year of the Network!" It became a running industry joke.
But of course, Metcalfe's Law contains some fundamental truths: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe's_law
I remember those days, with Computer Currents' "Year of the LAN" parody predictions repeated year after year. Macs with PhoneNET definitely made it easier and cheaper in the beginning.
It's like proclaiming The Year of Electricity. You can proclaim it once, say, in 1900, and it just would never end since then.
Proclaim the Year of the Network some time in 1993 or 1994, and you're golden.
And the products got shitty. They sold a managed switch that couldn't save its configuration
By design?
That is a remarkable decision.
My favorite 3Com-related thing: https://web.archive.org/web/20210421224904/https://nixdoc.ne...
It's the E1 pad between the barcode and the empty BIOS socket: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/3Com_3c509#/media/File:3Com_3C...Details (pg 88): https://www.ardent-tool.com/NIC/3c5x9b_Technical_Reference.p...
----------------------------------------
It is the user’s responsibility (with help from the configuration program) to avoid configuring the boot PROM on the adapter in such a way that the system is not able to boot. If this does occur, you can manually jump the Test Via using a #2 pencil. The Test Via forces the adapter into test mode, which disables the boot PROM so that the adapter configuration program can be run. You must cover the designated area thoroughly with the pencil mark.
Test mode forces the adapter not to perform the Automatic Initialization sequence, which means the EEPROM is not read and the adapter is left in the following configuration:
■ Address Configuration register = 0000h
■ Resource Configuration register = 0000h
■ Product ID register = 0000h
Test mode also shortens the ID sequence to 8 bytes (first is still FFh and last is 69h) and forces it to the active state (that is, the adapter is active and will respond to I/O cycles at base address 0200h even without going through the ID sequence).
After you are done, thoroughly erase the pencil mark.
----------------------------------------
I have a very personal connection with 3com, though it was in the late 90s.
Ron Crane which was 3com's 4th employee and designed the 3C100, 3com's first ethernet product. Many years later he hired me for my first real job of out school and brought me to the bay area. I then got to work side by side with him and David Boggs (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Boggs). At the time I never realized how special working with these two were...wasn't every company in the bay area like this?
I stayed in tough with Ron Crane until his death in 2017. He was both brilliant and incredibly sweet. He was so proud to take me behind the scenes at the Computer History Museum to show some work he'd been going.
I know Ron has writen about 3com...but this story captures the Ron I know: https://www.theregister.com/on-prem/2013/05/28/how-god-and-u...
"Monomaniacal perfectionism." Yep.
One day, Ron (a hardware engineer from Xerox) gave a talk about the theoretical performance of an Ethernet file transfer. He calculated the end-to-end latency and data-rate including disk latency, network latency, the number of clock cycles necessary to send and receive the data, etc.
He had (overhead project) slides that showed all his assumptions and calculations. Finally he displayed a slide with a graph showing this theoretical maximum, the actual performance of the 3Com network stack, and (IIRC) the Novell stack. As I recall, actual performance was about an order-of-magnitude lower than the theoretical max.
His point wasn't that our software division should be able to achieve the theoretical max. It was that if we (for example) got halfway there, we would know that Novell would never ship software that was twice as fast as ours.
He was very nice and scholarly about it and did not mean offense. I and many others weren't offended. But a surprising number of people were.
I'm sorry to hear that he passed.
Prior to the time period covered in the article, 3Com had a major disaster in Software. We were losing badly in competition with Novell in the Network Operating System category (though I and others would argue we had a technically superior product) and decided that we would partner with Microsoft and overpower Novell that way. Big mistake.
I was only a consultant at 3Com during this time, so I may have some of the details wrong, but 3Com essentially bet the success of its software division on the partnership. We built a product called 3+Open that was based on OS/2 Lan Manager. The product flopped. But unfortunately 3Com had agreed to multi-million-dollar, fixed annual license payments to Microsoft for OS/2. (Which may have been the right choice had the product been successful.)
To get out of the license payments, 3Com gave all its LAN software IP to Microsoft and exited that business. Microsoft used that technology in Windows NT Lan Manager and essentially destroyed Novell.
If you want details, the Bill Gates Biography "Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire" tells the story of that failed partnership.
> story of that failed partnership
For Microsoft it sounds like it "failed successfully".
I worked at Convergent Technologies at the time, and our CEO went on a vacation cruise and met Metcalf. They decided over drinks with little umbrellas in them, to merge our companies. We were the largest single customer of Intel processors at the time(the PC market was very fragmented).
But the stocks jiggled and the buyout plan was postponed when valuations became uneven, and it never happened.
They made good stuff. Then the cheap stuff got good enough for 90 percent of the use cases, then they bought into another sector where exactly the same thing happened again, except it was also a completely dead end. I don’t think any peripheral-card-only makers survived except Nvidia
network cards mostly died when it got integrated into the motherboard - same with soundcards and even graphic cards unless you wanted pro quality sound, extra networking features or a gamer. For everybody else, the basic integrated options were enough. I grew up in that era and not once did I look up what the 3com card offered over another networking card other than 10/100. Just wanted it to work. I'm sure some people are more discerning but not much.
There were some “interesting” issues with a lot of the cheap hardware for a long time though. A classic example was the WinModem. A fast modem for cheap? Sure! But it was cheap because it outsourced a lot of its processing to the CPU, so if your system was loaded up (in the day when CPUs were almost all single-core) meant there wasn’t enough left over to process inbound data in realtime which meant dropped packets and retries and horrendous lag and throughput.
Standard wisdom was to use an Intel EtherExpress Pro card for a long time after onboard Ethernet was available. Lots of server hardware had unused builtin NICs until they got decent.
3com was the very first investment I ever bought…I bought my shares on Thursday October 15th, 1987….those that are old enough to remember will know how that turned out.
I can maybe do you one better. I think my first investment was 140 shares of LNUX at F&F IPO pricing of $30/share, purchased Dec, 1999. It opened at $299/share the day of the IPO. Should've sold that day. Eventually sold it all in 2004 for $2.80/share.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geeknet
I installed a bunch of 3Server network servers in the late 80s-mid 90s. They were pretty darned solid. Tech support was an actual human, I knew his name (though have forgotten it now), and we actually went out to lunch one time, as my company was in Mt View and they were in Santa Clara, I think.
"never diversified" is a funny epitaph for a company that at various points owned Palm, US Robotics, half a Huawei JV and an IPS vendor.
Quite a long winded way of saying: bits of HP(E).
I can't quite remember if the 3c509, 595 or 905 was the fastest and best. I think 905. I created a boot disc for these and a few other NICs that featured on Novell's Cool Solutions.
Nowadays I have QSFP28+ to fiddle with.
3c509 was 10base-T ISA, so it's the slowest. 3c595 and 3c905 are 10/100 PCI cards, but the 905 was newer and more efficient (better bus mastering, more CPU offload)
I bought a 3c595 FastEtherlink card from CompUSA when I was in college because my dorm had ethernet and I was running FreeBSD and I thought tech specs were the be-all end-all.
It was fast, but not noticeably faster than any other cards my friends had. Except I spent way too much on mine.
Same thing thst happened to Digital Equipment Corporation - acquired by HP's bad clueless 1990s/2000s CEOs.
Well there’s a name I haven’t heard in a long long time
(2022) Yeah.. I know, it says 2026 at the top, but it was posted here in 2025, and you can see it's older. No idea why the author keeps ever-greening (the create date should at least reflect the original post?)
(Small text changes, and a CTA at the bottom)
https://web.archive.org/web/20220302141059/https://dfarq.hom...
SEO issue, changing the byline dates makes crawlers think it's new/fresh. Google prioritizes "fresh" content.
What happened to them? They never really diversified out of network cards, their cards were very very good, but for most people paying 3x as much wasn't worth it.
They split off their Palm (PalmPilot) division in 2000 to focus on Network equipment. The the .com bust happened.
Palm/Handspring/Treo could have been the iPhone, if they'd been better managed.
Could have, should have, would have…
iPhone wasn't just a form factor, the software traces back to NeXTSTEP 1989.
Fact of the matter is nothing could have been the iPhone, everything sucked in 2007.
Apple had the wind in its back with the iPod and Mac OS X Tiger.
The Intel transition was complete.
Apple was firing on all cylinders, what a time to be in your early 20s.
Even Android did a 180 once the writing was on the wall, it originally resembled BlackBerry OS.
I had a Treo fairly early on. Leave aside the physical keyboard. The iPhone had a whole app and media infrastructure built around it. Could Palm have gone there? Possibly. But that would have been a big step from where they were in the mid/late 2000s.
Android was originally designed for digital cameras, with tactile interfaces.
I loved my Treo, and in some ways it bettered the iPhone form factor, but the software wasn't comparable.
but the windows phone OS was better, and the hardware very good. They just couldn't get their shit together with the app ecosystem; even paying us devs huge premiums to write apps wasn't enough.
The article says:
>The first thing that happened was 3Com walked away from its enterprise networking equipment business. Admittedly Cisco was hard to compete with. But 3Com was the only brand succeeding at doing it.
I can't really agree with that because 3com never had a serious router product line. They had LAN switching equipment and NICs. There was nothing like a whole product line of routers that could take a full BGP table in the 1999-2000-2001 era, and certainly nothing like medium to large carrier routers. I'm talking about around the same era when the Juniper M40 was released to compete with Cisco in that market. Or a Cisco 12008. Anything broadly along those lines. 3Com was far behind in advanced IP routing and things that would serve as like a metro aggregation router or core router.
I don't know, we were eager to use 3Com products over Cisco whenever it was an option. Cisco was a bit user-unfriendly, not to mention expensive.
I am sure that the built-in Intel Ethernet ports on most motherboards have made Network Cards obsolete at least for the Home Market. When I got a 2Wire DSL modem, they threw in an Intel Ethernet card with it for free. Now I use WIFI 6 on my Wifi router and PC, and it is fast enough for me.
I remember when USRobotics was giving away free 56Kbps modems to BBSes if the SYSOP listed that they had a USRobotics modem and kept the BBS up for 24 hours a day.
> I am sure that the built-in Intel Ethernet ports on most motherboards have made Network Cards obsolete at least for the Home Market.
Someone is still making a NIC chip, they're just selling it to the motherboard OEM, instead of selling an add-in board to the customer (or selling a chip to the add-in maker). In a way, this is more sales, because desktops tend to come with a wired nic and a wireless nic, and so do good laptops.
You are understating how integrated this stuff is. If you make an Intel client motherboard, all you need to add for the network is the phy, jack and some passives.
I haven't really been following intel boards. AM4/AM5 chipsets (and cpus) don't have integrated MACs. I didn't realize intel was putting them in for client parts (Xeon-D had them, but Xeon-D is weird :p)