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25 Years Ago, a Meeting Spawned Wi-Fi
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.
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/...
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.
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.