Excelan was a computer networking company founded in 1982 by

Kanwal Rekhi Kanwal Singh Rekhi (born August 29, 1945) (Punjabi : ਕੰਵਲ ਰੇਖੀ) is an Indian-American businessperson. He was the first Indian-American founder and CEO to take a venture-backed company public on the Nasdaq stock exchange. Car ...

, Inder Singh and Navindra Jain. Excelan was a manufacturer of smart Ethernet cards, until the company merged with, and was acquired by

Novell Novell, Inc. was an American software and services company headquartered in Provo, Utah, that existed from 1980 until 2014. Its most significant product was the multi- platform network operating system known as Novell NetWare. Under the l ...

in 1989. The company offered a line of Ethernet "front end processor" boards for

Multibus Multibus is a computer bus standard used in industrial systems. It was developed by Intel Corporation and was adopted as the IEEE 796 bus. The Multibus specification was important because it was a robust, well-thought out industry standard with ...

VMEbus VMEbus (Versa Module Europa or Versa Module Eurocard bus) is a computer bus standard, originally developed for the Motorola 68000 line of CPUs, but later widely used for many applications and standardized by the IEC as ANSI/IEEE 1014-1987. ...

Q-Bus The Q-bus,Schmidt, Atlant G.,Unibus,Q-Bus and VAXBI Bus, in ''Digital bus handbook'', Di Giacomo Joseph Ed., McGraw Hill, 1990 also known as the LSI-11 Bus, is one of several bus technologies used with PDP and MicroVAX computer systems previous ...

Unibus The Unibus was the earliest of several computer bus and backplane designs used with PDP-11 and early VAX systems manufactured by the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) of Maynard, Massachusetts. The Unibus was developed around 1969 by Gordon ...

, and IBM AT Bus systems. The cards were equipped with their own processor and memory, and ran

TCP/IP The Internet protocol suite, commonly known as TCP/IP, is a framework for organizing the set of communication protocols used in the Internet and similar computer networks according to functional criteria. The foundational protocols in the suit ...

protocol software that was downloaded onto the cards from the host system. Excelan offered software like LAN Workplace that integrated the cards into a variety of operating system environments, including many flavors of UNIX,

RSX-11 RSX-11 is a discontinued family of multi-user real-time operating systems for PDP-11 computers created by Digital Equipment Corporation. In widespread use through the late 1970s and early 1980s, RSX-11 was influential in the development of later ...

, VMS, and DOS. The hardware and software were sold under the EXOS brand. In 1987, Excelan also acquired Kinetics, a small networking company that manufactured and sold a variety of Ethernet networking products for Apple Macintosh environments, most notably an

AppleTalk AppleTalk is a discontinued proprietary suite of networking protocols developed by Apple Computer for their Macintosh computers. AppleTalk includes a number of features that allow local area networks to be connected with no prior setup or the ...

-to-Ethernet gateway called the

FastPath The Kinetics FastPath was a LocalTalk-to-Ethernet bridge (now referred to as a router) created in 1985 to allow Apple Macintosh computers (which at the time only had LocalTalk network connections) to communicate with other computers on Ethernet n ...

. Excelan also manufactured and sold Ethernet network analyzer products, the first being the Excelan

Nutcracker A nutcracker is a tool designed to open nuts by cracking their shells. There are many designs, including levers, screws, and ratchets. The lever version is also used for cracking lobster and crab shells. A decorative version portrays a person w ...

, followed later by the Excelan LANalyzer.

References

Companies based in San Jose, California Companies established in 1982 Networking companies Networking companies of the United States Networking hardware companies 1982 establishments in California {{ict-company-stub

See also

References