3Com was a high flying maker of network cards and other network equipment. And then they disappeared with a whimper on November 11, 2009. What happened to 3Com?
Around the time of the dotcom boom, 3Com was a 5.8 billion dollar company. They were founded in 1979 by Bob Metcalfe, the co-inventor of Ethernet. And for the next two decades, they were the go-to brand for network cards. While the 3C501 network card is notoriously bad, their other cards from the 1980s and 1990s are very well regarded, and always were.
They cost more, but had good driver support, the hardware worked reliably, and they were a known quantity. And 3Com made them in the United States, which was becoming unusual even in the 1990s.
