>"The WD8003E used strictly shared memory to move data to and from the card. The entire 8K SRAM was mapped in the host’s address space, and additionally require

>"The WD8003E used strictly shared memory to move data to and from the card. The entire 8K SRAM was mapped in the host’s address space, and additionally required 32 bytes of I/O port space and an IRQ. The EtherCard Plus list price was initially $399. In contrast, the NE1000 did not map its onboard SRAM into the host’s address space , but likewise removed the DMA support, and only supported PIO transfers that utilized the DP8390’s Remote DMA feature. That meant the NE1000 only required 32 bytes of I/O port space and an IRQ; no other resources were needed. The NE1000 was priced at $495 at introduction (3Com’s EtherLink 3C501 cost $595 at the time) but almost immediately dropped to $395 (just below the WD8003). The comparison between the WD8003 and NE1000 is interesting. WD opted to use shared RAM which is faster but significantly more problematic to configure, and that was especially the case with the coming wave of 386 memory managers. Novell went in the opposite direction, choosing somewhat slower PIO but completely avoiding any configuration issues with shared memory. Both Novell and WD decided to drop DMA support, probably because it avoided yet another source of configuration conflicts and because especially on PC/AT class systems, DMA was slower than either PIO or memory anyway. It is important to keep in mind that the existing competition for the WD8003E and NE1000 weren’t fancy adapters like the 3Com 3C505 EtherLink Plus or the Exos 205T but, first and foremost, the cheapest Ethernet option available, the 3Com 3C501 EtherLink. And both the NE1000 and the WD8003E beat the 3C501 hands down, because they had a much bigger packet buffer (8K vs. 2K) and did not have the awful 3C501 limitation of having to switch between mutually exclusive transmit, receive, and host access modes. In 1988, the NE2000 appeared. It was essentially a 16-bit version of the NE1000 with support for 16-bit AT bus (but still capable of working in 8-bit slots) and two SRAMs in an 8Kx16 configuration. This doubled the onboard memory capacity and enabled both the DP8390’s internal bus and the NE2000’s external ISA bus connection to use 16-bit transfers, significantly improving the speed at which the host could communicate with the adapter. Western Digital released a similarly upgraded WD8013E (EtherCard Plus 16) with a 16-bit ISA interface and 16KB of onboard RAM. On the part of Novell, the motivation was clearly not to make money on hardware but sell more software. In 1991, Novell let Anthem/Eagle take over the network card manufacturing and distribution; after all, the hardware business was something Novell wanted to get out of, not into. The main purpose of the NE1000 and NE2000 was to drive the prices of networking hardware down, and it did just that."