NE2000 originally referred to a specific
ISA bus
network interface card (NIC) manufactured by
Novell, but now is a generic term which applies to all NICs which are
register compatible. There are also
PCI-NE2000 and
PCMCIA variants.
The NE2000 is basically the lowest common denominator of Ethernet cards today. (Novell also made a NE1000, but it never became very popular.) The NE2000 is guaranteed to be supported by almost every operating system out there, but the performance isn't the greatest. At the time the 3Com 3c509 was a much better card.