Wave LAN - History

History

WaveLAN was originally designed by COMTEN, a subsidiary of NCR Corporation, (later the Network Products Division of NCR) in 1986-7, and introduced to the market in 1988 as a wireless alternative to Ethernet and Token-Ring. The next year NCR contributed the WaveLAN design to the IEEE 802 LAN/MAN Standards Committee. This led to the founding of the 802.11 Wireless LAN Working Committee which produced the original IEEE 802.11 standard, which eventually became known popularly as Wi-Fi. When NCR was acquired by AT&T in 1991, becoming the AT&T GIS (Global Information Solutions) business unit, the product name was retained, as happened two years later when the product was transferred to the AT&T GBCS (Global Business Communications Systems) business unit, and again when AT&T spun off their GBCS business unit as Lucent in 1995. The technology was also sold as WaveLAN under an OEM agreement by Epson, Hitachi,and NEC, and as the RoamAbout DS by DEC. It competed directly with Aironet's non-802.11 ARLAN lineup, which offered similar speeds, frequency ranges and hardware.

Several companies also marketed wireless bridges and routers based on the WaveLAN ISA and PC cards, like the C-Spec OverLAN, KarlNet KarlBridge, Persoft Intersect Remote Bridge, and Solectek AIRLAN/Bridge Plus. Lucent's WavePoint II access point could accommodate both the classic WaveLAN PC cards as well as the WaveLAN IEEE cards. Also, there were a number of compatible third-party products available to address niche markets such as: Digital Ocean's Grouper, Manta, and Starfish offerings for the Apple Newton and Macintosh; Solectek's 915 MHz WaveLAN parallel port adapter; Microplex's M204 WaveLAN-compatible wireless print server; NEC's Japanese-market only C&C-Net 2.4 GHz adapter for the NEC-bus; Toshiba's Japanese-market only WaveCOM 2.4 GHz adapter for the Toshiba-Bus; and Teklogix's WaveLAN-compatible Pen-based and Notebook terminals.

During this time frame, networking professionals also realized that since NetWare 3.x and 4.x supported the WaveLAN cards and came with a Multi Protocol Router module that supported the IP/IPX RIP and OSPF routing protocols, one could construct a wireless routed network using NetWare servers and WaveLAN cards for a fraction of the cost of building a wireless bridged network using WaveLAN access points. Many NetWare classes and textbooks of the time included a NetWare OS CD with a 2-person license, so potentially the only cost incurred came from hardware.

When the 802.11 procotol was ratified, Lucent began producing chipsets to support this new standard under the name of WaveLAN IEEE, which it later renamed to ORiNOCO. Shortly thereafter, Lucent spun off the division that produced these chipsets as Agere Systems, which was later acquired by Proxim. Proxim later renamed its entire 802.11 wireless networking lineup to ORiNOCO, including products based on Atheros chipsets.