NE1000

The NE1000 and NE2000 are members of an early line of low cost Ethernet network cards introduced by Novell in 1987.

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).

Compared to the reference design's direct memory access,[1] Novell used Programmed I/O, which limited performance.

Novell's design also didn't map the card's internal buffer RAM into the host's address space.

The original card, the NE1000 (8-bit ISA; announced as "E-Net adapter" in February 1987 for 495 USD)[2] The "NE" prefix stood for "Novell Ethernet".

[4] Besides NetWare, driver support for these cards was (and still is) available for a variety of operating systems, including DOS, Microsoft Windows, UNIX, FreeBSD, QNX, and Linux.