25 Years Ago, a Meeting Spawned Wi-Fi 75
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.
Why was my comment deleted? (Score:1)
I worked for NCR at that time.
Your comment was moved (Score:2)
Your comment hasn't disappeared, it just got an offer to move to Atlanta.
No, more relevant to NCR than that (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 i
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I started working there in 93 at the CAE facility. In fact I worked there again in 2000 as well, although in a different capacity.
Histroy (Score:1)
Here is some history about WiFi
http://www.qsl.net/k/kb9mwr/projects/wireless/plan.html
Says nothing about a cash register company...
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I'd be interested in hearing insights.
Don't say that this side of the Pacific... (Score:2, Flamebait)
Every Australian politician and science bureaucrat knows that Australian radio astronomers invented Wi-Fi...
</sarcasm>
Re:Don't say that this side of the Pacific... (Score:4, 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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Re:Don't say that this side of the Pacific... (Score:5, 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.
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because it needs to be "translated" from "English" into "Australian".
Fair dinkum cobber, those dunny rats are charging us prices that aren't within cooee of the US ones, it's all exy as, it's enough to make you want to hit the turps!
Re:Don't say that this side of the Pacific... (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/... [wikipedia.org]
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/... [wikipedia.org]
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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"
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Therefore 802.11 isn't a technology. It's an industry group's technical specification. Be warned, there is always someone who can pick finer nits than you.
Yet what's in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, and that which we call Wi-Fi would still be used to wirelessly transmit donkey porn.
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You added a wholly unnecessary "normative" to what I've said. IEEE doesn't even use the term. Care to identify a non-normative IEEE technical specification?
By marketing term, you mean "brand name. Now it has become the name used for the technology by 95+% of people who refer to the technology.
Particularly in things relating to language, the major
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Nope. It's a registered trademark. You're failing at your attempts to be pedantic.
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WI-FI - "The certification mark, as intended to be used, will certify that goods manufactured by authorized persons comply with interoperability standards." Straight from TESS. Nothing to do with branding. In fact, the Wi-Fi mark is purposely intended to be used by multiple brands, which is easily seen in practice.
Furthermore, as a trademark, it is improper to use it as a generic reference to 802.11, which goes to my original point.
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Or your research skills simply suck.
"Our brands" [wi-fi.org], straight from the horse's mouth.
And as a trademark, it's perfectly proper to use it as a generic reference to 802.11 so long as the uses are licensed and the term is not used to refer to wireless communications generally. Again, don't tell me my own business, boy.
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"generic reference to 802.11 so long as the uses are licensed"
Generic != specific, fool.
If you are in fact a lawyer, as implied by your username, I'm reminded of Saul Goodman. But I suspect you're actually a first year law student, so get prepared to flunk out - you're not as good as you think, and certainly incapable of coherent, consistent argument.
You bore me. You're
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Or proof that you don't understand grammar and the English language. Our = The Wi-Fi Alliance, not others. Brands = brands plural, such as the very first one listed, which is "Wi-Fi," in the presented list or registered and unregistered word marks. Where are these other "multiple brands" on the page, eh?
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All true. Also true that what they "researched, developed, and implemented" already existed and was nothing new.
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What was researched, developed and implemented as a consequence was novel but not necessarily unknown before. It was an efficient and low cost FFT IC that didn't exist at the time as Fourier transform technology was implemented on general computers. Certainly, it's true that Fourier transformation was used in other radio signal processing but at the time, people were not applying this technique to wireless local network links; teams around the world dedicated to wireless local network links couldn't figure
Considering that IBM's origins were from NCR (Score:1)
NCR was drawn to open standards by years of frustration with IBM's control of computing through its mainframes, Hayes said. Like other vendors at the time, NCR constantly had to adapt its products to work with whatever IBM built. "We were tired of being a follower," he said.
I'm both surprised and not surprised at hearing this statement. I'm surprised since they have followed IBM's path for hardware design, but not surprised since NCR was ahead of IBM for moving closer to services on commodity hardware (courtesy of AT&T's purchase, evisceration, and spin-off of the company).
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What about war?
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WiFi is STILL a bad idea for a POS system (Score:3)
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.
Re: WiFi is STILL a bad idea for a POS system (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.
Re:WiFi is STILL a bad idea for a POS system (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.
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Problem: Dropped frames on gigabit.
Solution: check switch ports, check wiring.
Problem: Dropped frames on wifi.
Solution: retransmit and see if things time out.
You're right that the data is only a few hundred bytes. An industrial rs232 connection would be better than wifi.
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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 f
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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 no
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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.
ALOHAnet (Score:1)
Hello, wasn't ALOHAnet the basis for WI-FI? Invented in 1968 and operational in 1971? Anyone?
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sending packets over radio is not the entire process of wifi
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But... But... Hedy Lamarr invented WiFi!!! (Score:2)
John Sullivan is what the patents and academic pap (Score:1)
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That