What Happened to 3Com? | Hacker News Reader

What Happened to 3Com?

dfarq.homeip.net

112 pointsgvieri61 comments

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.

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.

HP themselves sold Aruba networking equipment with lifetime warranties and then just decided they wouldn’t honor it anymore. So a warranty change after a company acquisition sounds even more plausible in comparison.

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.

I wrote my first and only Ethernet driver for the 3c509. The thrill of that first ping!

is this the card that needed sometimes to be toggled to work in Linux

There's something about interfacing to hardware that just hits different in the programming world.

I remember changing the jumpers on the board to allow it to enter “promiscuous mode”

That’s interesting, thank you for they tidbit! Do you have any other stories? Personally I loved the pcmcia cards but mostly because drivers were included from 98se, so in the early 00’s my first job at a of repair shop that was an easy way to get a computer online/networked.

Outside that, I think I missed everything though I have memories of another company that merged into 3x in, xircom? Before they were acquired again.

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.

And the products got shitty. They sold a managed switch that couldn't save its configuration

By design?

That is a remarkable decision.

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

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.

They first did it in 1986 -- and it was too early!

(It was the 1980's version of the Linux Desktop joke)

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.

> later in life as a pundit

An amusing example of his punditry:

"I predict the Internet, which only just recently got this section here in InfoWorld, will soon go spectacularly supernova and in 1996 catastrophically collapse."

Keep in mind he co-invented Ethernet, so he knew what he was talking about!

Here's hoping we'll be able to look back with equal amusement at the AI doom predictions.

https://www.elon.edu/u/imagining/expert_predictions/from-the...

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 projector) 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.

My favorite 3Com-related thing: https://web.archive.org/web/20210421224904/https://nixdoc.ne...

     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'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.

----------------------------------------

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".

Never heard about 3Com work with MS before... Just WOW ! Another company cooperation with MS failed and then MS use wreckage to big gain.

MS realy is the trojan horse. Because probabilities multiply into less probable outcomes but result is again and again the same.

Microsoft LAN Manager was a flop, too. Windows NT was entirely new product. No such thing as NT LAN Manager existed.

Source: me, LAN guy since 1990 and NT admin since 1993.

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.

>not once did I look up what the 3com card offered over

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42746741

tldr:

"The RealTek 8139 PCI NIC redefines the meaning of 'low end.' This is probably the worst PCI ethernet controller ever made...8139 supports bus-master DMA, but it has a terrible interface that nullifies any performance gains that bus-master DMA usually offers.

For transmission, the chip offers a series of four TX descriptor registers. Each transmit frame must be in a contiguous buffer, aligned on a longword (32-bit) boundary. This means we almost always have to do mbuf copies in order to transmit a frame, except in the unlikely case where a) the packet fits into a single mbuf, and b) the packet is 32-bit aligned within the mbuf's data area. The presence of only four descriptor registers means that we can never have more than four packets queued for transmission at any one time.

Reception is not much better. The driver has to allocate a single large buffer area (up to 64K in size) into which the chip will DMA received frames. Because we don't know where within this region received packets will begin or end, we have no choice but to copy data from the buffer area into mbufs in order to pass the packets up to the higher protocol levels.

It's impossible given this rotten design to really achieve decent performance at 100Mbps, unless you happen to have a 400Mhz PII or some equally overmuscled CPU to drive it."

tldr tldr: it didnt matter past 2001 since slowest low end CPUs were cheap enough to nullify all the potential gains from smart good 100Mbit NICs

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.

Hp bought them ;-)

"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.

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.

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)

(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.

Android was originally designed for digital cameras, with tactile interfaces.

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.

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.

Well there’s a name I haven’t heard in a long long time

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

Same thing thst happened to Digital Equipment Corporation - acquired by HP's bad clueless 1990s/2000s CEOs.

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.

But for what application? LAN switch? Endpoint CPE router equivalent to a 2611? I never saw a 3com router that could take a full table.

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)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNVi

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