Worldwide Connectivity Enabled by IEEE 802

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Dorothy: The first commercial success of 802.11

based products occurred in the late

90s so 1999, 2000. Really the whole

consumer market adoption of Wi-Fi, 802.11

products, began with Steve Jobs and

his vision at Apple of having wireless

connectivity in the Apple AirPort and

the corresponding laptop device. In the

early days, consumers loved Wi-Fi.

Consumers love Wi-Fi today, and they

loved Wi-Fi back in 1999 and 2000

because of the flexibility that it gave.

Bob: Well the first Ethernet was

inside of Xerox, and its initial success

was connecting the brand new personal

computers being built at Xerox together

in a big Internet inside of Xerox. But

then in 1980, we decided to take Ethernet

out and make it a worldwide standard.

And the general method for doing that

was, of course, to promote the benefits of

standards, competition, and focused

investment at interconnectivity. And

until the Internet, each computer

maker had their own interconnection

standards, and so therefore you couldn't

connect the whole world up. And the

standards, the TCP/IP standards, those are

the protocol standards made by the

Internet community, and the I Triple E

802 standards, principally Ethernet,

became the standardized plumbing for

this worldwide interconnected network.

Well, I would say the processes of I

Triple E 802 were historically important,

and I'm so grateful that they happened.

And the standard, the initial

standard of Ethernet was hard fought, but

then began a process of evolving the

standard and branching the standard as

different requirements came up.

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