What Happened to 3Com?

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

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.

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...

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).

Details (pg 88): https://www.ardent-tool.com/NIC/3c5x9b_Technical_Reference.p...

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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.

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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.

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.

(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...

"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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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