Hi, welcome to my first post! While I was on Twitter I found a very interesting article using the hashtags #edtechchat #edchat. The article that I found was “How Wi-Fi Almost Didn’t Happen” written by Jeff Abramowitz.
Click on the link to view the article! https://www.wired.com/story/how-wi-fi-almost-didnt-happen/?bxid=5cc9dfbbfc942d13eb1e0923&cndid=50510896&esrc=desktopInterstitial&source=EDT_WIR_NEWSLETTER_0_DAILY_ZZ
When I looked at the article title ‘How Wi-Fi Almost Didn’t Happen’. I was instantly into the article since I started to think how hard could be now days without Wi-Fi. Can people imagine a world without Wi-Fi? Because, honestly, I don’t.
In the article, Abramowitz wrote about how Wi-Fi came a big thing for the whole world. he also talked about how some people take Wi-Fi for granted while they have it, but as soon the Wi-Fi stop working they might become crazy about it.
He wrote about the history of the Wi-Fi, how the people that created it never thought that it was going to be this massive helpful tool for everyone.
“Wi-Fi officially launched 20 years ago, on September 15, 1999. You may be imagining a flashy launch event featuring Christina Aguilera (“The wireless genie is out of the bottle!”), or a breathless headline that booted the feared Y2K bug from the front pages. Instead, imagine eight technophiles in an Atlanta Convention Center briefing room waiting to “Superman” their jackets to expose polo shirts bearing the made-up word Wi-Fi before a crowd of 60.
There was no lack of enthusiasm in that room; 17 tech companies big and small had committed to back Wi-Fi, including Apple, Dell, and Nokia.”
So, how Wi-Fi didn’t almost exist? Jeff Abramowitz tells us the story: By early summer 1999, the wireless world resembled the Wild West. Businesses had largely adopted Ethernet wired networking, which connected desktop computers in “local area networks” at 10 megabits per second. Consumers, meanwhile, were sending emails from home to the squealing and squawking sounds of the latest 56 Kbps dial-up modems. Products for wireless local area networking, or WLAN, did exist, primarily for businesses, but a multitude of companies offered proprietary solutions that risked rapidly becoming obsolete. The solutions considered an official standard were based on an initial specification known as IEEE 802.11 (the wireless networking group of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers).
HomeRF was the biggest and most visible WLAN consortium at the time. The specification was developed by the group of Compaq, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, and Microsoft; it targeted the consumer market, and was backed by more than 80 other companies. Unlike 802.11 products, HomeRF products communicated with each other, and were considerably cheaper.
Meanwhile, the second generation of the IEEE standard, 802.11b, was expected to get final approval at the end of September. The company 3Com, then a leading networking firm (both 3Com and Compaq were acquired by HP), had developed products based on this new and faster standard that were slated to ship toward the end of 1999. With the clock ticking, 3Com brought five strong IEEE advocates together to found an independent Wireless Ethernet Compatibility Alliance, or WECA, which aimed to ensure that products based on the pending standard would work together. The name “FlankSpeed” was proposed, but they ultimately trademarked the name “Wi-Fi”—a riff on “hi-fi,” or high-fidelity from the era of home stereos—and established the rules by which devices could become “Wi-Fi Certified.”
How the world would react if Wi-Fi stop working?
I’m pretty sure it could lead to a chaos in someway since almost everyone on the planet use this magnificent tool; people use it to communicate, to learn, to know about what is happening in other countries in a very easy way, it also help students search information for their homework.
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