Excelan
Excelan was a computer networking company founded in 1982 by Kanwal Rekhi, Inder Singh and Navindra Jain.[1] Excelan was a manufacturer of smart Ethernet cards, until the company merged with, and was acquired by Novell in 1989.[2] The company offered a line of Ethernet "front end processor" boards for Multibus, VMEbus, Q-Bus, Unibus, and IBM AT Bus systems. The cards were equipped with their own processor and memory, and ran TCP/IP 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, 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-to-Ethernet gateway called the FastPath.
| Type | Public |
|---|---|
| Industry | Computer Networks |
| Fate | Acquired |
| Successor | Novell |
| Founded | 1982 |
| Founder | Kanwal Rekhi, Inder Singh and Navindra Jain |
| Defunct | 1989 |
| Headquarters | , |
Key people | Kanwal Rekhi, (CEO) |
| Products | Network hardware |
| Revenue | US$65,860,000 (1988) |
| US$5,459,000 (1988) |
Excelan also manufactured and sold Ethernet network analyzer products, the first being the Excelan Nutcracker, followed later by the Excelan LANalyzer.[3]
See also
- Novell LAN WorkPlace for DOS
References
- Urd Von Burg; Martin Kenny (December 2003). "Sponsors, Communities, and Standards: Ethernet vs. Token Ring in the Local Area Networking Business" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2012-03-22. Retrieved 2012-03-25.
- "Excelan to Be Acquired: Excelan Inc. said..." Los Angeles Times. 1989-03-27. Retrieved 2020-05-29.
- "Novell and Excelan to Merge". The New York Times. 24 March 1989. Retrieved 23 September 2009.