Xircom, Inc., was an American computer networking hardware and mobile technology company. Headquartered in

Thousand Oaks, California Thousand Oaks is the second-largest city in Ventura County, California, located in the northwestern part of Greater Los Angeles. Approximately from the city of Los Angeles and from Downtown Los Angeles, it is named after the many oak trees pr ...

, Xircom was one of the first companies to develop

network computing Network Computing is an online technical news publication that began as a printed magazine. During that period, ''Advertising Age'' ranked it among the ''Top 300'' print magazines. and advanced in 1995 from #146 to #133 with a circulation of 38,50 ...

products for notebook computers. Products included computer

memory card A memory card is an electronic data storage device used for storing digital information, typically using flash memory. These are commonly used in digital portable electronic devices, such as digital cameras as well as in many early games conso ...

LAN Lan or LAN may refer to: Science and technology * Local asymptotic normality, a fundamental property of regular models in statistics * Longitude of the ascending node, one of the orbital elements used to specify the orbit of an object in space * ...

adapters,

modem The Democratic Movement (, ; MoDem ) is a centre to centre-right political party in France, whose main ideological trends are liberalism and Christian democracy, and that is characterised by a strong pro-Europeanist stance. MoDem was establis ...

s, and remote access server products. The company's products enabled notebook users to share information over a network connection. During its existence, the company possessed manufacturing facilities in

Penang Penang is a Malaysian state located on the northwest coast of Peninsular Malaysia along the Strait of Malacca. It has two parts: Penang Island, where the capital city, George Town, is located, and Seberang Perai on the Malay Peninsula. Th ...

Malaysia Malaysia is a country in Southeast Asia. Featuring the Tanjung Piai, southernmost point of continental Eurasia, it is a federation, federal constitutional monarchy consisting of States and federal territories of Malaysia, 13 states and thre ...

, and international offices throughout

Europe Europe is a continent located entirely in the Northern Hemisphere and mostly in the Eastern Hemisphere. It is bordered by the Arctic Ocean to the north, the Atlantic Ocean to the west, the Mediterranean Sea to the south, and Asia to the east ...

and the

Asia Pacific Asia ( , ) is the largest continent in the world by both land area and population. It covers an area of more than 44 million square kilometres, about 30% of Earth's total land area and 8% of Earth's total surface area. The continent, which ...

. In 2001,

Intel Intel Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and Delaware General Corporation Law, incorporated in Delaware. Intel designs, manufactures, and sells computer compo ...

acquired Xircom and in early 2003 laid off most of Xircom's Thousand Oaks employees.

History

Xircom CreditCard Ethernet 10-100-Upgradable-0318

The company was founded in 1988 by Dirk Gates and Kirk Mathews on the premise of delivering modem and

Ethernet Ethernet ( ) is a family of wired computer networking technologies commonly used in local area networks (LAN), metropolitan area networks (MAN) and wide area networks (WAN). It was commercially introduced in 1980 and first standardized in 198 ...

connectivity to mobile computers. The company grew to over 2,000 employees and achieved revenues of $500M and a market cap in excess of $2B. Mobility solutions were based on

IEEE The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is an American 501(c)(3) organization, 501(c)(3) public charity professional organization for electrical engineering, electronics engineering, and other related disciplines. The IEEE ...

802.11 IEEE 802.11 is part of the IEEE 802 set of local area network (LAN) technical standards, and specifies the set of medium access control (MAC) and physical layer (PHY) protocols for implementing wireless local area network (WLAN) computer c ...

, GPRS, and

Bluetooth Bluetooth is a short-range wireless technology standard that is used for exchanging data between fixed and mobile devices over short distances and building personal area networks (PANs). In the most widely used mode, transmission power is li ...

technologies. Xircom was known as an innovative leader in networking technology, pioneering the world's first wireless networking devices for portable computers, known as Netwave. Xircom's NetWave adapters boasted a raw data rate of 1M bit/sec (blazing fast at the time) and fostered the creation and development of today's WiFi infrastructure and devices, which are virtually everywhere today. Xircom was also equally innovative in its working environment. Employees were encouraged to express their creative natures, fostering a positive and creative environment where new ideas and efficiency flowed as easily as the waterfall in their indoor fish pond, which was originally constructed in front of the Engineering Vice President's cubicle as a joke.

Products

Pocket LAN Adapter

In 1988, the only universal connection available on notebook PCs was the printer port, so Xircom devised the Pocket LAN Adapter that attached to the printer port and connected the notebook PC to a network. Xircom then became one of the top providers of networking computing devices.

RealPort

Xircom was renowned for their

PC Card PC Card is a technical standard specifying an expansion card interface for laptops and personal digital assistants, PDAs. The PCMCIA originally introduced the 16-bit Industry Standard Architecture, ISA-based PCMCIA Card in 1990, but renamed it to ...

s, the most well known of which was the RealPort series designed by boutique start-up ID firm Next Planet. The 32-bit RealPort CardBus Ethernet 10/100+Modem 56 combined 10/100 Mbit/s Ethernet, a 56K modem, and even

GSM The Global System for Mobile Communications (GSM) is a family of standards to describe the protocols for second-generation (2G) digital cellular networks, as used by mobile devices such as mobile phones and Mobile broadband modem, mobile broadba ...

connectivity via an externally connected

Mobile Phone A mobile phone or cell phone is a portable telephone that allows users to make and receive calls over a radio frequency link while moving within a designated telephone service area, unlike fixed-location phones ( landline phones). This rad ...

, in a single dongle-free Integrated PC Card solution. RealPort family of cards solved the major problem mobile users experienced with PC Cards: lost, forgotten, or broken cable connectors and broken pop-out jacks. By eliminating fragile

dongle A dongle is a small piece of computer hardware that connects to a port on another device to provide it with additional functionality, or enable a pass-through to such a device that adds functionality. In computing, the term was initially synony ...

s on the device, the RealPort Integrated PC Cards provided robust and reliable communications by integrating connectors directly into the card.

NetAccess

NetAccess Series Remote Access cards (RAS) included models ISDN, and the world's first multiport modem (MPM-4 and MPM-8).

REX 6000

The

REX 6000 The REX 6000 is an ultra-thin Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) produced by Xircom, and later Intel, from about 2000 to 2001. The REX may be synchronized by inserting it in a host PC's PCMCIA/PC-card slot. Docking stations were manufactured for c ...

was an ultra-thin PDA produced by Xircom. It was the world's smallest full-function PDA due to its size as a Type II

. The REX synchronized by insertion into a host PC's PCMCIA/PC Card slot. The REX 6000 was similar to its predecessor (the

Franklin Franklin may refer to: People and characters * Franklin (given name), including list of people and characters with the name * Franklin (surname), including list of people and characters with the name * Franklin (class), a member of a historic ...

REX 5000 {{Short description, Personal Digital Assistant released by Franklin The Franklin REX 5, (also known as the “Rex-Pro”, as the “Rex 5000”, and with cosmetic variation as the “Rex 5001”) was one of the Rex line of Personal Digital Assist ...

) except it included a touch screen, among other improvements.

PortGear & PortStation

Xircom acquired Entrega, a small company that produced the

USB Universal Serial Bus (USB) is an industry standard, developed by USB Implementers Forum (USB-IF), for digital data transmission and power delivery between many types of electronics. It specifies the architecture, in particular the physical ...

upgrade boards (for people with older PCs lacking USB connectors) and converters (USB to serial, to parallel, to

). It turned these products into its own Port-Gear line, including special drivers to support USB in Windows NT v4 systems.

Handheld products

Before being purchased by Intel in 2001, Xircom made a series of innovative connectivity devices for handheld computers, including the CompactFlash (Ethernet, Modem, GSM, etc.), SpringPort modules for Handspring, and sleds for Palm.

Acquisition

On January 15, 2001

announced that it would acquire Xircom for approximately 748 Million US$.

References

{{Intel Intel acquisitions Defunct networking companies Defunct computer companies of the United States Defunct computer hardware companies