NO WIRES: How the Apple Airport Changed Everything

[Music] we often like to think of sudden breakthroughs and Eureka moments as the drivers of progress but these are really the exception they obtain greater Fidelity and stability more often there is a long drawn out process of peac Mill advances setbacks and struggles that eventually add up to something greater but even when something revolutionary seems like it's within our grasp it still requires a leap of faith so today on the serial Port we're exploring the surprisingly complicated and contentious history of Wireless networking we'll be looking at a device that no one saw coming and talking to the people that made it [Music] happen the history of wireless communication goes back to the late 19th century but even during these very early days people were figuring out how to both minimize radio interference and avoid radio jamming one of the techniques that emerged is known as spread Spectrum this was famously utilized by Hollywood actress and inventor Hedy Lamar and composer George antile in their development of a patented secret communication system in 1941 during the height of World War II spread Spectrum works as the name suggests by spreading the transmission of information which would normally be in a relatively narrow band over a wider range of frequencies the rece if they know the modulation scheme can then despread the transmission to extract the information to an outside Observer the transmission may look just like noise which has obvious advantages for secrecy the technique also helps avoid radio jamming because the transmission is spread across a wider bandwidth which can make some radio jamming techniques ineffective spread Spectrum was actually classified as military technology until 1981 and in 1985 the FCC issued a landmar Mark ruling allowing the technique to be used without a license in the ism or industrial scientific and medical frequency bands these included the frequencies around 9915 MHz 2.4 GHz and 5.8 GHz and with the newly open bands available for unlicensed activity and spread Spectrum authorized for civilian use it didn't take long for new applications to appear in 1986 just a year after the FCC ruling Bruce Tuck an electrical engineer that specialized in analog RF design responded to a job posting from a company called National cash register or NCR founded in Dayton Ohio in the late 19th century NCR manufactured the first ever mechanical cash register invented by James ridy and in the 1950s they got their start in computers and electronics and even jointly developed the scuzzy interface in 1982 however tuck was hired for his RF expertise at their utre facility in the Netherlands first project I was doing there was you know I I came because of the carrot of Wireless research but uh the first thing was actually a very standardized wir based internet you know NCR had cash registers connected so you could call it their sort of inra net I guess and it was done over wire and I was there to help design some of the cost reduction ship report it was like 1 megabit per second over twist the P that's when NCR began a feasibility study to determine if something called direct sequence spread Spectrum which is a spread Spectrum modulation technique could be used in retail department stores their clients wanted to connect their Terminals and cash registers to the back office computers without cables so that they did not need to drill holes in their shiny marble floors after redesigning store layouts so so tuck and his colleagues created a prototype wireless transceiver as a result of the study it operated in the 900 MHz band and transmitted at 500 kilobits a second but even higher data rates were possible a colleague of tux Hans Von D found that using something called The Barker code was the key to higher data rates without delving into too much technical detail here this was a method of encoding a single bit of data in a wireless transmission that allowed data rates to reach upward of 2 megabits per second with excellent range and resistance to interference exactly what they needed for their application at the time and after this breakthrough tuck had a realization you know this this is really really a wireless local area network right the prospect of creating a wireless land was enticing but tuck knew that whatever they built it had to work with existing protocols that was for me interesting to look at to make strategically whenever we do we have to make sure that we build something that doesn't require tcpip to be changed uh you know how does bridging work and could we do something that's a wireless bridge and make it look like any other Bridge so on people plug this in eventually they just think hey I know how to do this on ethernet and I could do it on wessy theet but to get this kind of interoperability a standard would be needed so how do you do that and and and try to do that in a propriatary way we thought wasn't the way to go because one of the things with wireless connectivity is you need you need to either own the whole system right to have things communicate or or make sure the ego system is there so if you're building a radio and someone else is building a different radio if they don't communicate with each other then you get in these feef Stones right and all of a sudden there's not interoperability then you have to be the biggest player to make sure that this becomes a big system so I would say no you know this will be better to have uh this as a standard that's when ncr's Vic Hayes got involved with the 8024 L working group of the i e standards organization the same place where the ethernet standards were formulated 82.4 L was formed to investigate whether the token bus standard could be extended to include Wireless but after determining that neither token bus nor the existing ethernet standard would be a good fit Hast submitted a request to create a new one and on September 10th of 1990 at a GM plan in ashaa Canada the 802.11 working group was formed with Vic Hayes as the elected chairman the meetings that week included dozens of participants from NCR Toshiba Motorola IBM and many other companies wanting to be involved in the formation of the new wireless standard and amazingly the handwritten diagrams and notes are still available to see from this first meeting the working group would use ncr's design now coined Waveland as a basis for the emerging standard but their work was just getting started in 1990 NCR released their first Waveland products at networld interop in Dallas Texas Waveland operated at 9915 MHz over one Wireless Channel with a maximum data rate of 2 megabits per second and in 1991 NCR was acquired by AT&T and they continued to developed the Waveland range throughout the 9s with the technology now out in the wild but still no official standard the next few years produced a bevy of new wireless products these include products like the deck rout access point a design licensed from NCR then there was aeronet AR land with both 915 MHz and 2.4 GHz versions proxim developed their rangeland line starting in 1991 and symol Technologies had their own Spectrum 24 system as well but there was a problem many of these systems were not interoperable with one another despite all of these companies having a presence in the 802.11 working group and the prices were astronomical while there were some successful applications of these early Wireless Solutions PC manufacturers were apprehensive and few showed any interest due to the sheer number of proprietary Solutions in the market and the high price points and in 1996 AT&T restructured and created Lucent which The Wire less land groups now fell under and among these setbacks and changes the first 802.11 standard was finally published on November 18th of 1997 with little to no Fanfare and was some saying it was too little too [Music] late in over the years the 82.1 working group had grown tremendously in size and scope there were competing standards like home RF and hyperland supported by different camps of Manufacturers which were vying to gain control on the marketplace and claim wiress superiority 8021 at that time was getting a little bit more popular it was still not there but we realized we had to break the 10 megabit barrier and it all came to a head in May of 1998 the working group met for their buy annual interim meeting at a Holiday Inn in utre Netherlands part of the agenda was to vote on ad 211b an extension of the original standard which would support an 11 megabits per second data rate proposals of how to achieve this higher speed were put forth by several companies represented in the working group lucent's proposal had been voted down so two contenders were left one from Harris semiconductor and another from micore a relative newcomer to the scene the voting was split almost evenly with microor edging out Harris by a single vote vote this was thrown into chaos though as a product manager from 3com stood up and contested the entire voting procedure claiming that members had voted along quote party or in this case manufacturer lines this was against the spirit of the I rules which state that votes must be for what the voter considers to be the best technical proposal regardless of who put it forth and according to the 3com product manager this was undoubtedly Harris's solution after this the meeting erupted in conflict and went quote down in flames and the working group itself was nearly torn apart by these events however cooler heads prevailed as representatives from both Lucent and Harris set down to reach a compromise solution and actually the compromise technology turned out to be I think better than either one so that's doesn't necessarily it's not necessarily the case usually that when you compromise it comes out better the end result was something called complim lary code keying or cck this was a new modulation scheme that not only improved performance over Harris's original proposal but decreased complexity in the original Lucent scheme with the solution now in hand what 802.11b really needed was the right company one willing to be bold to take a risk and introduce Wireless to a wired world there has been so much that's happened in terms of network computing as an example that Apple's completely missed out on Steve Jobs had been back at Apple as interim CEO since September of 1997 his mission was to bring the company back from the brink of bankruptcy and part of that plan was resting on simplifying their product lineup jobs devised a new product road map consisting of four quadrants a desktop and portable meant for consumers and a desktop and portable for professionals these would be the four new systems that would help reinvent Apple for the 21st century around this time Les vogle a software engineer who had been working on the recently shuttered Apple Newton project moved to the new group responsible for the consumer portable this would eventually become the iBook but internally it had a different moniker the original code name was $7.99 which was the target cell price now we couldn't figure out how to build it for $799 let alone sell it for $7.99 vogle had known Steve Jobs and Steve wnc since he was a teenager having met them through Alex camad who ran call computer in the early '70s both Bogle actually started working at call computer at the age of 15 and later attended meetings of The Homebrew Computer Club Bogle eventually became an early customer of wnc was upgraded my HP 35 to an HP 55 I believe I gave him money for that vogle had originally been tasked to work on implementing the CPU on the iBook which was now internally referred to as P1 however Apple wanted something to differentiate the new system we wanted to have home networking so we looked at uh every technology we could we looked at uh infrared we looked at power line and we looked at uh Wireless but these other Technologies all had insurmountable shortcomings so it came to wireless but I had been doing the research for uh Wireless and it kind of got to the point where if we were going to do it someone had to be leading this project and so I asked to lead it and Mantia CPU which people told me was crazy but uh I'm like Wireless is more important Fogle then recommended that Apple rehire Dick Allen who he knew from Apple's Advanced Technology Group Allan had a presence on the 802.11 working group and jobs asked him to find the best inclass Wireless solution for the iBook Allan then brought on Art Astron to help with the hardware engineering and Manufacturing Allan knew that the 802.11b standard was close to being completed he also knew Bruce tuck and had the confidence in loosen that their wireless radio development was the most advanced with apple involved what happened there is you know Apple was talking to us that sometime before I got a call from uh Dick Allen he used to be uh in California he had a startup phonics and he was doing Wireless infrared and so then he called me up and goes Bruce you know I like your models and stuff and I know you're doing a chip are do are you doing the new standard chip for 11 megabit that's going to fit the standard I go yeah we're we're going to do that right so I morphed thought our technology we were doing our own chip that got changed and we're now doing the standard chip and he said okay are you almost done yes are you going to you know sell that product to other people yet not yet we're not ready good so he says you know cuz got hired by by Steve to uh look at Wireless and I says I know you're Bruce and I think your stuff is good so let's see what happens and then he hung up you know and then all a sudden Ripple fact you know art Astron then went to utre to meet with the Lucent team I remember flying their first month to Holland and meeting with the whole team and they were also very depressed demoralized cuz they already been at it for like 10 years and uh they had a product line called Waveland which was a PC board and an access uh point which was basically a PC like a rack moded PC with hard drives and two slots for PCM CIA cards and he was offered offered to sell it to us for $1,500 not exactly an apple price point and Steve just went okay we'll talk to you later despite this high price point a meeting was scheduled with apple and Lucent on April 20th in 1998 prior to the meeting the Lucent group gathered together at the Peppermill Lounge in copertino just across from Apple's headquarters to formulate a plan for Success the CEO of Lucent Rich mcin had shown little interest in Wireless networking and was mainly concentrated on multi-billion dollar deals with OS at the time but he was a quick student and after a brief briefing he was able to talk about Wireless technology like a seasoned Pro and they headed across the street to Apple HQ the difference between the two groups could not have been more Stark with the formal business attire of Lucent contrasted against the California style Birkenstock wearing Apple crew there was one notable person missing though Steve Jobs the room fell into an awkward silence but thankfully jobs finally walked in needing no introduction jobs immediately took over the meeting laying out his vision for the iBook and why it was the right time for wireless as case links a manager at Lucent pointed out presenting to jobs was easy as he would often do the talking and explanation for you and that's when jobs dropped the bomb Lucent would Supply the wireless Nick to Apple for $50 the room fell silent jobs stood up and left this was a Monumental challenge for Lucent they had to deliver not only the new 802.11b Nick but the access point as well and both of these had to be done by the spring of 1999 but luckily for Lucent they had an ace up their sleeve in the form of Doug Carl okay Carl was a pioneer of Wireless to ethernet Bridges first developing them at Ohio State University to help link buildings across campus using early NCR Wireless Nicks exactly like the one we saw earlier this later morphed into his own company called carlet which provided Wireless Bridges firewalls and specialized in outdoor Wireless technology so because of that work that we've been doing with the NCR card somehow we got the attention of the NCR uh corporation which was in uh Holland in the Netherlands and um got a call or something email I don't know that a couple NCR guys were going to stop by OSU and see what we're doing after attempting their own in-house software development NCR turned to Carl who ended up developing the embedded software for many of their Wireless products throughout the 90s the secret to Carl's success was his embedded software which was extremely efficient and the the Reon reason that it worked which was a pro and a con for for the software package at the time was the curl was written in highly optimized assembler 386 assembler and the reason that that was is because the project that it came out of had to do full wire speed uh ethernet to ethernet and with without fail that it supported it it fronted all of the labs and buildings that we had at the University because we had a need for that of of packet filtering a bridging you know firewall thing at the at the border of each building and so we had to handle a lot of traffic and the only way I could get that to happen is by re I had an oscilloscope on the motherboard watching the timing of every one of the instructions and how long it took from one packet to another to actually process that and where I mean it was fun but it was it was very detailed and in 1998 NCR then loosened asked him if he could help on a project for a consumer device but little did he know at the time it was for Apple so we negotiated price for that which I they they never told me who it was they just said well we'll probably get our volume up and I was like great if the volume goes up that's great so we got a little bit of a one-time development cost and then well then they said oh okay well that's fine we signed the contract and they said well it's for Apple it's a consumer item it's they're shipping all around the World there'll be hundreds of thousands of them and I'm like oh you know crap with the cat out of the bag Carl provided Lucent with a list of required components necessary to implement his software the Lucent developed access point was powered by a single board computer with the AMD Elon SC 400 a processor based on the 486 and Lucent used their newly developed 802.11b compliant PC mcia wireless card as the radio the access point could be connected to an ex existing wired land but with Broadband still Out Of Reach for most households an apple developed 56k dialup modem was included as well and then there was the product design itself Astron worked with Johnny IV Apple's legendary design Chief to come up with the physical design of the access point which was actually inspired by a mushroom shaped lamp in astron's office and with all three companies rushing to meet the deadline there were a number of challenges close to production tuck received a phone call from Allan complaining that the access point was not working what do you mean it's not working well I turned it on and it doesn't work and it turns out that the the paint they used was metallic so it didn't work because he had a faraday cage with our antenna inside there I say he go I go hey this is not going to work dick you know and it was a secret I couldn't see what the casing was right that was why he says yeah I know I know but the that we can't I said you have to tell you go we can't change it because you know Steve you know he he accepted it if you tell them something as reality Distortion field he'll tell you to change the little Wars of Nature and so so so what what they did eventually they found their paint guys and they found a paint that was plastic in the composition that had the same glossy look so that was able to be done so let's just show you the development scenarios going on there with that crisis averted the airport was ready to debut but Apple had gone one step further they had so much faith in Wireless that they built antennas into every single device from that point forward they were betting big on wireless and this could be either apple and Steve Jobs next world changing Innovation or a Monumental fumble so on July 21st of 1999 the airport was ready to be unveiled at macworld except there was a last minute problem just before doors for the announcement we couldn't get anything to work Steve was like well we'll just not announce it then at the last minute I noticed that the router the lights on it were going crazy I'm like who's using it and we finally found in the Green Room that um Frank covo had been streaming QuickTime movies be called doors and we figured out we're just going to go with it live and hope that it works and we stopped Frank from streaming and it did work with job signature flare after debuting the new iBook to the crowd he said well but there is one more thing there is one more thing Let me just show this to you for a minute okay I'm going to go to CNN interactive here and uh see what's on CNN oh there's CNN you can see uh and uh maybe I'll go to Disney here you know I can I can come over here let me show them the uh show show these guys how work come on over here you want to skip behind me then yeah uh so uh I can just go to disney.com [Applause] here oh you notice something thank you you notic uh no wires no why the airport card would sell for a near unbelievable $99 in the base station for $299 far lower than anyone in the industry thought possible and it sold in huge numbers their first day saw 150,000 units sold another 150k that second day and again on the third day the demand was so high that they had to shut down online orders on the fourth day after launch the question of whether the public was ready for wireless had been answered and it was a resounding affirmation of Apple's big betat the airport kickstarted the next generation of Wireless into overdrive and the PC industry was scrambling to play catchup Michael Dell was reportedly Furious that apple had beaten Dell and in fact the enti higher PC market to the punch and shortly after the airport's release 802.11b was finally approved on September 16th 1999 the 80211 working group now at nearly 100 members celebrated this achievement in Santa Rosa California with Vic Hayes still at the helm as working group chairman the history of Wireless is complicated with twists and turns successes and failur years but here we are today where 802.11 signals are nearly as ubiquitous as sunlight from its meager Beginnings at 2 megabits per second and now supporting multi- gigabit data rates 802.11 completely transformed how we use our devices and freed the local area network from the confines of the wire but so much of its success is due to the airport and the company that took a bold risk embedding it all on wireless that whole saying I'm going to come out first a company like apple was willing to take that risk of saying I'm going to put it as you know in every PC it has to be this price and uh and we're going to create the market but I would say that was a important Reflection Point where Apple you know launched and it was it and then everyone else got on the bang wagon right I think Apple was the right company because we worked hard to simplify it our goal was to solve home networking we just wanted it to be easy so to celebrate this incredible device we're setting up our very own Apple airport to dial in the serial Port ISP so that we can recreate the magic of discovering Wireless for the first time all right let's try to connect wireless graphite connect C and we did it we're online and connected to the internet with the airport it's incredible that this really all started with wanting to wirelessly connect cash registers back in the80s and all of these devices that are in millions of households today can trace their routs back to the airport and it's thanks to the dedication and passion of the pioneers of wireless and the audacity of people like Steve Jobs that were willing to take a leap of faith to change our world thanks for watching the serial port and we'll see you next time

Channel: The Serial Port

Views: 211,267

Keywords:

Id: EhBxWHrG7K8

Length: 29min 35sec (1775 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 14 2024