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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.

13 of 75 comments (clear)

  1. Your comment was moved by sethstorm · · Score: 2

    Your comment hasn't disappeared, it just got an offer to move to Atlanta.

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  2. Re:Don't say that this side of the Pacific... by PolygamousRanchKid+ · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Yes, CISRO has the patent . . . and charges outrageous fees to companies that use the technology. In turn, foreign software companies charge even more outrageous fees for software sold in Australia . . . because it needs to be "translated" from "English" into "Australian".

    Who wins? Certainly not you normal Aussies . . .

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  3. 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/...

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

    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.

  5. 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.

  6. 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.

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  7. WiFi is STILL a bad idea for a POS system by leonbev · · Score: 2

    It's amusing that 25 years later, you would be crazy to set up a POS system with just a WiFi network connection.

    Even if you're not worried about wireless reliability, security, and interference issues (and you should be!), it will still never process credit card transactions as fast as a Gigabit wired connection.

    1. Re: WiFi is STILL a bad idea for a POS system by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

      My company has over 7,000 retail outlets. We have no need for anything over 128kbps at POS. a Cc authorisation takes less than a second, 99% of that is the time it takes our partner to respond to the request. Gigabit does nothing for us.

    2. Re:WiFi is STILL a bad idea for a POS system by fullgandoo · · Score: 4, Interesting

      It's amusing that 25 years later, you would be crazy to set up a POS system with just a WiFi network connection.

      Even if you're not worried about wireless reliability, security, and interference issues (and you should be!), it will still never process credit card transactions as fast as a Gigabit wired connection.

      That is a very uninformed comment.

      POS terminals don't stream high definition videos. They transmit small financial transactions that are hardly a few kilo bytes, even with the EMV chip cards of today. Until the recent past with magnetic stripe transactions, the data used to be only a few hundred bytes.

      The advantage of a Gigabit wired connection over a 10Mbps wireless network is primarily of bandwidth. The wired network might offer a little less latency, but nothing that would make a measurable difference in transaction processing speed in this target environment.

      Furthermore, the POS terminals would only use the wireless network within the store to send transactions to a local server. From there on, the transactions are sent to the issuer bank over a variety of inter-connected networks and servers, generally speaking. So the local wireless network is only involved in fraction of the overall lifecycle of a financial transactions.

    3. Re:WiFi is STILL a bad idea for a POS system by drinkypoo · · Score: 2

      Even if you're not worried about wireless reliability, security, and interference issues (and you should be!), it will still never process credit card transactions as fast as a Gigabit wired connection.

      Guess what? You can do that with a POTS modem. That's how every single retailer with just one or two stations did it until just recently, like the last couple of years. Now most people are using an internet connection, but it's not because of bandwidth. It's because of convenience. Every day people successfully make sales via iPhones, Android tablets, etc etc, and almost all of it is wireless. If they are smart, they have cell data as a backup. The devices will automagically detect if the wifi is down and fail over.

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    4. Re:WiFi is STILL a bad idea for a POS system by Solandri · · Score: 2

      Even if you're not worried about wireless reliability, security, and interference issues (and you should be!), it will still never process credit card transactions as fast as a Gigabit wired connection.

      As I said last time this came up, current trends in wifi technology are moving in a direction which overcomes Shannon's law. The theorem assumes a shared communications channel. That is, if you transmit your signal at -45 dB, then everyone else using that same channel sees -45 dB of noise. Your signal is noise to them, and interferes with their signal.

      Beam-forming and MIMO (multipath) techniques being used in 802.11ac subvert this assumption. For a visual analogy, it's why you can see your smartphone display in the sunlight, even though the sun is much, much brighter (its signal strength at optical wavelengths far exceeds your phone display's signal strength). Although the sun is very bright, the light it gives off is highly directional. By using sensors (the lens structure of your eyes) which can "tune in" to light coming from a narrow angle, you can basically filter out all that sunlight noise and pull out a clear signal from the smartphone display.

      So the way wifi is progressing, you're going to be able to transmit almost as if you were the only person transmitting on those wavelengths. The only time you'll get interference from other wifi transmissions is if a radio source is directly in line with your source. And even that can be overcome with multipath techniques (similar to how a wide-aperture camera lens can selectively blur the background while keeping the subject in sharp focus).

      Speed, bandwidth, interference, and reliability won't be the issue. Security will be.

    5. Re:WiFi is STILL a bad idea for a POS system by ericloewe · · Score: 2

      Card terminals that don't attach to a larger POS system (in other words, they're not integrated into the POS and work completely independently) almost exclusively connect via GPRS these days. Card transactions use a trivial amount of bandwidth and GbE levels of latency are not required.

  8. No, more relevant to NCR than that by sethstorm · · Score: 2

    When AT&T bought NCR in the 1990s, they offered to move lots of people over to Atlanta. Since more people accepted than they could hire, that resulted in people moving hundreds of miles to receive a pink slip.

    In 2008-2009, the World Headquarters was moved from Dayton, Ohio to an Atlanta suburb called Duluth - due to political incompetence at the city and state levels in Ohio. NCR did about everything they could to make a case for Dayton, but they couldn't get a response.

    If you want to be politically incorrect, feel free to blame Rhine "but they'll never move!" McLin, part of a Dayton family thriving more on diversity status than competence. Not only did the McLins let 125 years of Fortune 500 history walk out the door, their family blocked economic development in the 1980s and one of them mishandled human remains of over 50 people. Race did not save them from justice, thankfully.

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