D-Link - the adapter in the machine, not the rack

It entered the industry from the opposite end to most of the vendors on this timeline. The companies that dominate these pages sold to carriers and large enterprises; this one sold the card that went into the personal computer, then the hub, then the small-office router. That is the half of the network nobody writes histories about and most people have actually touched.

One 1989 decision is worth placing against the making milestones here. It began designing and manufacturing its own Ethernet controller chips rather than buying them, to cut cost and dependence - the exact opposite of the direction the industry later took, when merchant silicon made buying the chip the cheaper option and building it the expensive one. Both choices were correct in their decade, which is the point.

The founder’s stated aim was a company that made its own products rather than manufacturing under somebody else’s badge, in a country whose electronics industry was largely built on doing exactly that. The timeline records the Irish and Brazilian versions of that question elsewhere; this is the Taiwanese one, answered by a company that put its own name on the box.