25 Years Ago, a Meeting Spawned Wi-Fi

Posted by Soulskill on Friday September 11, 2015 @04:14PM 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.

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Re:Don't say that this side of the Pacific... by Ozoner · 2015-09-11 18:08 · 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/...