Lesson plan

Excelan

Excelan was a computer networking company founded in 1982 by Kanwal Rekhi, Inder Singh, and Navindra Jain. Excelan was a manufacturer of smart Ethernet cards, until the company was acquired by Novell in 1989. 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 MS-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. Excelan also manufactured and sold Ethernet network analyzer products, the first being the Excelan Nutcracker, followed later by the Excelan LANalyzer.

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Article summary

Excelan was a computer networking company founded in 1982 by Kanwal Rekhi, Inder Singh, and Navindra Jain. Excelan was a manufacturer of smart Ethernet cards, until the company was acquired by Novell in 1989. 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 MS-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. Excelan also manufactured and sold Ethernet network analyzer products, the first being the Excelan Nutcracker, followed later by the Excelan LANalyzer.

Key claims

  1. date of foundation: 1982 — source: Wikipedia · confidence 0.95

Discussion questions

  1. Summarise the article in your own words. Which single claim would you verify first, and why?
  2. The record states that the date of foundation is "1982". What evidence would count against this claim?
  3. Which claim in this article is most likely to be revised as the sources update? How would you check its current status?
  4. If two sources disagreed about one of these facts, what would you need in order to trust one over the other?

Bibliography

  1. Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1356466994

Key claims and bibliography are generated from the same tracked claims and sources as the article page.