Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

25 Years Ago, a Meeting Spawned Wi-Fi

Posted by Soulskill on from the necessity-is-a-mother dept.

alphadogg writes: It was retail remodeling that spurred NCR, a venerable cash-register company, to find out how it could use newly opened frequencies to link registers and mainframes without wires. Its customers wanted to stop drilling new holes in their marble floors for cabling every time they changed a store layout. In 1985, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission voted to leave large blocks of spectrum unlicensed and let vendors build any kind of network they wanted as long as they didn't keep anyone else from using the frequencies. NCR jumped at the chance to develop a wireless LAN, something that didn't exist at the time, according to Vic Hayes, a former engineer at the company who's been called the Father of Wi-Fi.

3 of 75 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Don't say that this side of the Pacific... by Ozoner · · Score: 5, Informative

    As always there were many who help develop a given technology.

    Many companies marketed ISB band links, but it was Lucent (owned by NCR) who developed the WaveLan system which evolved into the various WiFi standards we have today.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

    But it was the Australian CSIRO who patented the modulation scheme (FFT with multiple carriers) that was the foundation technology for WiFi.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

  2. Re:Don't say that this side of the Pacific... by Gadget_Guy · · Score: 4, Informative

    Which is unfortunate because there's nothing special about WiFi, satellite networks have been using the same (and vastly more complex) modulation methods for decades.

    Yes, it was the CSIRO satellite technology that they adapted for WiFi. And it was special because nobody else at the time could solve the problem. People like to simplify the issues by say that the CSIRO claim that they invented WiFi, but they have never said that.

  3. Re:Don't say that this side of the Pacific... by msauve · · Score: 2, Informative

    "it was the Australian CSIRO who patented the modulation scheme (FFT with multiple carriers) that was the foundation technology for WiFi."

    802.11 products existed for years before CSIRO patented OFDM, which influenced the WLAN world when 802.11a came along. But it was the completely different 802.11b, which CSIRO had absolutely nothing to do with, which actually made wireless popular. Also, OFDM existed for decades before CSIRO patent-trolled it.

    CISRO has no valid claim to creating 802.11. Finally, "Wi-Fi" isn't a technology, it's an industry group's marketing term.

    --
    "National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law