Historic IEEE 802 Group Looks Back and Forward

An anonymous reader writes "The IEEE MAN/LAN Standards Committee — better known as the people who brought us Ethernet, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth — is celebrating its 30th anniversary next week. This article has interviews with the original committee chairman and other veteran members, and reveals some of the inside situation. It also looks at some of the upcoming 802.x standards including one that sends data by modulating visible light."

Comments

Re:IEEE Bluetooth?

[east coast]

The IEEE didn't develop any of the mentioned technologies. They just standardized them.

Get the configuration right

[thoughtspace]

I am staggered how complicated it is to setup WiFi a lay-person. Far too much jargon (SSID, WPA, WPA2, WEP, TKIP, AES+TKIP, channels ...), and stupid ideas like multiple WEP keys. Let alone connecting via ethernet, change the subnet, browse to an IP address, etc etc etc just to get it going. What an awful decade of design.

Look ... from day 1 we just wanted a secret password.

Public networks are different and need to be publicly identified - don't shoe-horn it into the same user interface.

Start thinking like a user and stop this engineers crap.

Re:Ethernet was fine

[TheRaven64]

In case people don't get it, with the current wired Ethernet standards, you cannot have an easy way for a Cafe/Hotel/Conference to provide encrypted wired connections to guests in a way where they cannot snoop on each other's connections either. If you want security, you should be using end-to-end encryption.