The Journey of Radios From Hardware to Software

An anonymous reader writes "The New York Times is carrying a story all about the process of replacing radios with software. The article tells the tale of Vanu Bose, son of the man who started the Bose company, and his quest to bring software to what was previously a hardware-only enterprise. He met a lot of resistance in the 90s to his ideas, because processor technology was not up to the task. Now that technology has caught up with Vanu, his software (and other products like it) are increasingly replacing now-outdated hardware components. 'Well-established companies like Motorola and Ericsson now use elements of software-defined radio for their base stations. But Mr. Bose was the first to come to market with software that could handle multiple networks with the same equipment. Software radio appears to offer an elegant solution to what has been a vexing problem: how to have a single handset, like a cellphone, communicate across multiple networks. For instance, the G.S.M. standard, for global system for mobile communications, is used broadly in Europe, and most notably in the United States by AT&T.'"

Comments

Re:A little too much feature creep.

[Propaganda13]

Next thing you know, they'll want to communicate with these radios.

Re:Bose blows

[dreddnott]

I first heard this as a charming little poem:

Got no highs? Got no lows?
Only midrange! Must be Bose.

Re:I read this and...

[Dogtanian]

I read this and end up believing that my next radio will be delivered to me as a software printout on a sheet of paper. Typing in program listings? I thought that had pretty much died out by the end of the 1980s, and thank God for that. It was a PITA back then, can you imagine how long it would take you to type in software nowadays? If we generously assume that one can fit a 16KB BASIC listing onto one A4/legal-sized page, a 16MB program (pretty small by today's standards) would require 1000 pages!

(Meanwhile, a double-layer DVD's worth of data would need roughly half a million pages, so you'd need a small truck to deliver 500 or so Yellow Pages-sized volumes to your house. And I wouldn't want to be the one typing all that data in. Particularly not if I had to save it to cassette...)

Anyway, your idea is silly. In truth, your next radio will come in the form of a CD-ROM ;-)