The NTE device looks suspiciously like a ULN2803/4!

For your darlington array to work as expected, you have to source current into the input - however - the 8051's don't have an active pullup like many other microcontrollers. There's a couple of ways around this, but my normal solution is to use some inverters like a 74hc04 between the micro and the darlington array. Due to the inverter, clearing the port pin will have the effect of turn on the darlington output. The good side effect of this is when the micro is starting up the port pins are high thus your relays (or whatever is connected to the darlington array) will not activate until you clear the port bit.