Xircom

» see xircom.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

Before a laptop had a network socket built into it, getting one onto an office network meant going through the parallel port. Xircom's first product was the Pocket LAN Adapter, a small box that hung off the printer connector and did ethernet through it. That is an unglamorous answer to a problem, and in 1989 it was the only answer anybody had. The company had been founded the year before by Dirk Gates and Kirk Mathews in Thousand Oaks, California.

The PC Card slot made the real business. Xircom's CreditCard Ethernet adapters, and later the RealPort line that put ethernet and a modem into one card with a socket you could actually plug a cable into, were the standard fitting for corporate laptop fleets through the second half of the 1990s. Some RealPort models carried a GSM radio. At its height the company employed over 2,000 people and turned half a billion dollars of annual revenue, against a market value above two billion. Manufacturing was in Penang, Malaysia.

It also built early wireless networking gear under the Netwave name, several years before anyone was saying the word Wi-Fi in public, and it sold a PDA called the REX 6000 that was itself the size of a PC Card and slotted into a laptop to sync. Neither became the company. Xircom was, in the end, the firm you bought a card from.

Intel announced the purchase on 15 January 2001 at approximately 748 million dollars. The tender offer completed on 8 March with about 91 percent of shares tendered, and the remainder was merged in the following week. Two years later, on 31 January 2003, Intel said it was shutting the Thousand Oaks site. Analysts quoted at the time gave the plain reading: Intel had been interested in the technology rather than the business attached to it.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ the fifteen million ~

Xircom lost a trademark fight with 3Com and settled it by paying fifteen million dollars plus continuing license fees. On a hardware product already sliding toward commodity pricing, a settlement of that size is not a line item, it is a change in what the product costs to sell. Contemporary coverage of the Intel shutdown named it as part of why the networking card business had stopped making sense.

~ what a card slot was for ~

The PC Card standard now looks like an evolutionary dead end, but for about a decade it was how a portable computer got any capability its maker had left out. Modem, ethernet, SCSI, memory, a hard disk: all of it arrived as a slab of metal the size of a thick credit card, and laptops shipped with two slots because you often needed two things at once. An entire industry existed in that slot.

It ended because the functions moved inside. Ethernet went onto the motherboard, then wireless went onto the motherboard, and by the middle of the 2000s the reason to own a network card was gone. Intel is the company that did most of the moving. It bought the best of the card makers about eighteen months before the card itself became unnecessary, which reads as bad timing until you notice who controlled the timing.

~ nobody here owned a laptop ~

Xircom's customer was a person with a company notebook and an expense account. In Turkey between 1998 and 2005 that person existed in small numbers and I was nowhere near being one of them. A portable computer was something you saw on a desk in an office, not an object a student owned, and paying separately for a card to go in its side would have been an absurd conversation against what the machine itself cost.

Everyone I knew got online from a desktop with an internal modem, or from a cafe where somebody had already run Ethernet along the wall to every station. The network stayed in the building. Xircom sold two thousand people's worth of product a year into a market of travelers whose employers paid for the card, and there were not many of those employers here in 2001.

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