Xircom
More info
- Creator
- Dirk Gates et al.
- Released
- 1988–2001
- Owner
- Intel (from 2001)
- Type
- Hardware maker
The company behind the network and modem cards poking out the side of every road warrior's laptop.
Xircom was founded in California in 1988 and broke through with the Pocket Ethernet Adapter, a small box that plugged into the parallel port and put a laptop on the network before laptops had anywhere to put a network card. When the PC Card (PCMCIA) slot became standard, Xircom followed and became one of the biggest names in Ethernet and modem cards.
The 1998 RealPort line fixed the cards' most annoying flaw — the fragile dongle that always got left in a hotel room — by building the jacks into the card itself. Intel bought Xircom in 2001 for a little over $700 million. Around the same time networking and Wi-Fi started shipping inside the laptops, and the brand was gone within a few years.