Thanks guys. I think you did a wonderful job telling the story of the early days of WiFi and the Apple Airport, the first residential WiFi router. I read the first 24 hours of comments and have a couple things to note that may help. One is that right after the Airport was announced several other companies including Dell, Sony, Buffalo, and Lucent followed with their own clones of the Airport; all based on the same NCR/Lucent 802.11b WiFi WaveLAN cards and KarlNet software. Some disagree, but In my humble opinion it is appropriate to credit Apple for making the business commitment and be the first and make the market. Some commented, as the video mentioned, that other companies had competing wireless products prior to 1999, which is true. NCR/Lucent themselves had several pre-802.11 cards since 1991. Our KarlNet software had wireless bridge/routing support since 1993 for as many wireless cards as we could find. Our main product line was outdoor point-to-multi point wireless back-haul. WaveLAN being based on direct sequence spread spectrum as opposed to frequency hopping spread spectrum made it the fastest radio card. As far as I know, prior to the Airport, other companies had only Access Points (bridging only) which would not work in the residential setting where a NAT (Network Address Translation) router is required. The Airport was a NAT router, which all WiFi routers are to this day, and the Airport also included an auto dial-out capability. It is strange to think about it today but back in 1999 few people had broadband, just dial-up. Other than the Airport clones mentioned above, even Linksys didn't come out with their first residential router until 2001. Please let me know if you know of a residential router embedded product in 1999, I want to make sure I have my facts straight. Thanks. Doug Karl.
Doug, I just want to say thanks for pioneering early outdoor wireless backhaul! I've been working at a WISP for the last 9 years and I wish I was there for the beginning of it all. I've heard a lot of stories from the late 90s about how life changing high speed wireless broadband was to a lot of different people in areas that were underserved by the big telcos. Scrappy companies with home-built equipment running Karlnet and other similar products allowed many areas to get access to broadband years sooner than they would have otherwise. Even today, fixed wireless is still allowing for some fantastic competition with wireline carriers. Thanks again for jump starting it all!
Mr Karl, thank you - Your software was incredible, Airport wouldn't have been possible without it. Truly world changing work. As far as residential routers before 1999? I can't think of any, I was working at a university in the late 90s & the systems department was testing a few wireless products to see about implementing wireless on campus - this was pre-Airport - and none of them would have worked in a home environment, they were all just access points as far as I remember, needing the rest of the infrastructure to operate. And they were slow. Maybe 2 or 5mbps?
I gotta say, as soon as I saw Steve do the "look, no wires!" trick with the iBook, I knew I'd buy my first laptop. It never made sense to me (or not enough sense) to own a laptop computer and still have a tether to the wall. I bought my blueberry RevA iBook, AirPort card, and UFO-style AirPort base station with leftover student loan money.
I remember this presentation. The hula hoop floored me. Vintage Jobs. He could sell anything! I bought the laptop and base station immediately. I remember the moment I took my laptop out on the balcony of my apartment and began to surf the web. I felt like I was floating. It was a profound moment to no longer be tethered to the wall. This product not only did what that claimed , it didn’t perfectly! Ty for the trip down memory lane!
I can only imagine how seeing that presentation must have blown everyone's mind. Something we take so much for granted now, happening for the first time right in front of you. You may not even have realised it at the time, but it would change society immensly
He wasn’t great because “he could sell anything”… he was great because they’d obsess over picking the right products and making them precisely how a user would want them. From there, he could influence the audience easily, because he was excited, and so were you
@@lucasjames8281 Not "how a user would _want_ them", but how the user _WILL_ use them. If you live in the Apple World(tm), you do things the way Apple tells you to. In many ways, it makes Apple's products easier to use - everything is exactly the same. Apple does put a great deal of work into logical, intuitive UI elements.
It was certainly a surprise to anyone who had never seen wireless technology. (which had been around in various forms for several years.) Of course Apple Fans(tm) will drool over it. The simplicity and low cost were worth the drool.
A while back my wife and I found an Airport at a thrift store for $2.99. She said “What does it do?” I just said “networking” without giving it much thought. Now I can show her this. I’m glad I bought a piece of internet history for three bucks!
If you haven’t already, you should look at ubiquiti, when Apple shut down the router team they left and formed Ubiquiti and it’s one of the best networking companies around by far
I was there for Airport's debut in 1999, had no idea how much it would change my life... Was at Apple during this period, and from 2000 until 2002, I think half my time was spent educating education market customers about 802.11. After that, it took off like a rocket. Still have my original Airport with it's Wavelan Silver card on display. After almost 25 years, it still looks great! Great video - Thank you!
This video was wonderfully produced. I have to say I found Doug Karl and his work on wireless at OSU fascinating -- I just started an IT career with OSU this past Monday, and I had no idea that OSU was at the forefront of wireless back in the 90s or that one of the biggest contributors to helping Apple start the wireless revolution hails from Central Ohio of all places. I would love to hear more stories from him about his work and of the University!
I guess once Doug Karl knew about the bad deal with Apple, he started creating "high performance" Point to Point, Point to Multipoint wireless links and he practically created an industry called WISP, Wireless Internet Service Providers. It really all stated with Lucent Technologies and the IEEE 802.11b and Karl software. He created license for every link, cost of Outdoor routers started from $59 to $299 Dollars. You could change the firmware for Apple, Dell, IBM, HP, Orinoco, Proxim and make them Karl Net capable. His software is way better than anything I've seen today. The diagnostics where excellent. I was able to use mi laptop with a small antenna and have internet at distance of more than 60 Km.
Just retired mine finally last year and sold them on eBay. Spent $700 on a new setup and long story short, i'm looking for more airports on eBay. Nothing compares when it comes to how dead reliable they are.
I agree. I still use Airport Extremes. I have a mesh network setup using them. You can setup a mesh network you just have to do it manually. I'll use them for as long as I possibly can.
I remember when an Airport was installed in my 4th grade classroom right around 2000, and we got our first iBooks to play with. We were pretty lucky to have such cutting edge computers, but I don't think anyone (including myself) really appreciated the wireless capability for a few more years.
I remember being blown away by the concept of having wireless internet on a mobile device. Having the ability to surf the web and watch videos on a couch or on your bed was insane to me at the time lol
Same here! 6th grade in 2002 we had airport and IBooks in our classroom. Although we thought it was cool, we didn’t appreciate how cutting edge the technology was.
The AirPort doing dial-up automatically when you connect to it is such a nice touch. It's already all impressive new technology, but they went the extra bit to make it simple to use even if all you had was dial-up and its measly 56kbit/s didn't do 802.11b's whopping 11Mbit/s any justice. They could have shown stupid fast wireless file transfers between two iBooks, but they understood that the real big deal was accessing the Internet, wirelessly, and that would often be a single client and dial-up Internet. It could have so easily been overlooked.
It was funny how Apple still built analogue modems into their products when analogue telephony networks have become extinct. But you couldn't get apple with ISDN.
At the time there was very little broadband. DSL and Cable Modem were just starting to be deployed. It was unclear at the time 1998/1999 who would be able to use the Ethernet port. However, we made NAT work on either the serial PPP dial out port or the Ethernet port for the lucky few who eventually had broadband.
Like @dougkarl3895 said, ADSL, was something new that was just starting to be implemented. I was working for Corning ( Yes the Fibre Optics guys ), back then, we where manufacturing and shipping millings of ADSL filters per month. The filters had to be installed at the TELCO and SOHO , it was just a crazy fast idea that was implemented super fast. Now to be fair, I think the 56 Kbps was more like 115 Kbps because the modem was doing compression. The Airport was using a Conexant RP56D Chipset ( Ext Rockwell International ) modem. ADSL back then was about 128Kbps, only a few had over 1Mbps. Just look at the video when Steve Jobs was connecting to CNN... That was blazing fast LOL. Kalnet did a great job back then. If you wanted something similar you had to use a PC with WinGate or WinProxy, and that was using wire, plus think on the cost.
@@tschuuuls486 Even in Europe, ISDN wasn't that big outside of the audio broadcasting world. Most households had analog, then ADSL for data and analog for voice, then VoIP.
I loved seeing HomeRF mentioned. Before the recession following the 9/11 attacks, I was contracting for Siemens. We were working on launching a HomeRF ADSL router in conjunction with AT&T, Proxim, and Netopia. It also had cordless phones that could do up to 4 voice lines with VoDSL connecting to the same basestation as the PCs with their wireless cards. All over HomeRF. It was miles better than 802.11b and was out first. Compaq and Intel used to offer HomeRF equipment. But the licenses for manufacturers were expensive and there was basically only one chipmaker - Proxim - who also sold routers and wireless cards. Making it less attractive knowing you had to compete against your only chipmaker. As soon as 802.11b became widespread, HomeRF died a quick death and I was laid off.
I used some Intel branded HomeRF cards in the early '00s while in high school. It was a very cool tech. I used these cards with a small LAN and had Win98SE (and later XP) Internet Connection Sharing to share my family's dial up access with a few other systems.
This is a recurring theme in tech. It doesn’t really matter how good a product is. The ones that succeed and end up enshrined in history are the ones that somebody has the guts to submit to a standards body, rather than try to keep it to themselves.
I used to work for the W-Fi Alliance, my job was to sit all day, with an engineer from the a company making a product. Well I did just that in 2003 for the AirPort Extreme. It ran 802.11G. All day we ran tests, took traces. You see, Apple used a lot of off the shelf stuff inside. They were using a Broadcom chipset. They HAD to know, from their internal tests, the problem I already knew that chipset has working with the other devices. They choose the cheaper one, so I failed them when the tests didn’t pass. I set them back for release by at least a few months because they already had like a million made waiting in Taiwan , to stamp “Wi-Certified” on the box. I seriously doubt Steve Job was happy. There’s nothing he could have done though. I wasn’t about to risk my job
lol the crowd going ballistic because of wifi. Never saw that clip. Genius. I just remember as a kid, wow what a world we live in, we now have wireless internet. And how far we have come. Deployment with current cloud options have become a joy for all.
Apple’s adoption of it really was “the revolution.” I wasn’t even an “Apple Guy”, but the Apple AirPort router was *by far* the cheapest 802.11b access point on the market. Everything else was high-end corporate gear for $1000+ that was *JUST* an access point. Apple’s was an access point and router in one, with a modem for dial-up for home use that didn’t have broadband yet. I worked at Intel at the time, and had bought a Lucent WaveLAN card for my Windows computer, and an Apple AirPort base station. I had commented to my boss at Intel about how great it was, and he had me bring them in to demo them (note: personal equipment was strictly forbidden in the building I worked in; my boss had to personally sign it in at security.) He loved it, and promptly bought Apple AirPort base stations for our department, and WaveLAN cards for our laptops. He strategically placed one base station so that it reached the lunch room. It meant having this clearly Apple badged device very visible from a major hallway.
Thank you for clarifying, I was sitting here thinking "st00pid apple hype" but your comment really put this matter in perspective, in a manner in which I can appreciate Apple's contribution.
I am actually the great X9 grand son of the owner of NCR John Patterson. Thank you for giving the company its proper credit for the cash register! While he did not start the company, which wasn’t called NCR at that point, he acquired the designs for the cash register and patented them, he didn’t pay a lot of money for the designs if I remember correctly as the inventor wasn’t that interested in taking it to market. So with that be bought the designs and the rights to sell it effectively selling him the business. NCR went on to be known for its influence in the formation of IBM the classic competitor of the company. They both played massive roles in the early days of digital technology and NCR also played a significant role in the industrial revolution and helped bring much change to factory work.
NCR, as noted in the video, also created the SCSI disk interface standard which was VERY popular interface for most all non-IBMPC's and quite widespread until recent years.
Thank you, for this outstanding video. As a person with a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering, a Senior Member of IEEE, and an Apple home computer user since 1996, I did not know most of the information presented. Now in my early 60's, I have tried to share with my younger co-workers just, how truly revolutionary Apple's wireless Airport Card and base station was. But, sadly because it is so common place today, they think wireless computer communication in the home has always been around. The four (4) sided chart of Steve Jobs product division was really set in the year 2000, when all four (4) computer models both desktop and laptop each supported Airport Cards (smile...smile).
I was gifted a classic airport when I was about 12 years old, I remember using it for the first time with 56k dialing up from my iBook and having the internet on the couch. What a time to be alive.
I still remember when the AirPort was presented at an Apple Day in Munich (the day after Cupertino). We all were quite astonished. Even more when we asked for the price. And most of all, the AirPort connected to ISDN (ADSL in Germany at those times) and even better, it supported 1TR6, the predecessor of ISDN. As soon as it was available to buy, I had it. Easy setup, maybe a few hickups over the years I used it. Great product, great memories! Thanks for reminding me.
That was quite something to see the Doug Karl segment. I came across KarlBridge in the past few years attempting to do something with my "retro network". Great video.
@@compu85 I probably have over a hundred units Lucent OR, ROR, COR, Apple with the software modification and the pigtail coming out, Orinoco, Proxim, Dell. All running Karlnet with the Karlnet License.
Very informative and fascinating. Back then I worked for an ISP ironically and recall my boss getting the Airport when it first came out. Had worked with some wireless communications and early wisp gear before but it was finicky. The Airport like most things Apple was the first to kinda just work out of the box while everyone else still needed a console cable. That said the original Lucent card I had from that era that came out of an access point I think with it's external antenna port and hot radio that could be put in promiscuous mode was a war drivers dream. This whole series brings back memories. Working for the ISP was overall my all time favorite job.
Amazing report. I remember in the early days of DSL we home phone lines that would do home networking. Wi-Fi was still very exotic in the early 2000s. Home networking really wasn't a well understood concept for dial up because whatever computer you were using would just dial up directly, but with laptops getting cheaper, and with broadband access, it became necessary to connect more devices faster at once. Since dropping Ethernet is a difficult project, Wi-Fi became the major player. If you have the time for it though, performance gains can still be found with a wired connection with things like your TV and computer spaces.
Another extraordinary video. Thank you for making this. I remember watching that keynote where Steve walked away from the table with the iBooks in his hand. I could not believe what I was seeing. I'd certainly had exposure to wireless networking at my university campus 10 years earlier (they used some sort of short-range radio or infrared thing between buildings), but I had never seen it in a consumer product. Hats off to everyone involved, truly and gratefully, but my particular hat is tipped to Steve Jobs. His ability to foresee a future where the major disrupter was "convenience" brought so much we take for granted today.
Honestly, I’m glad Apple set the standard for how easy the connection UI should be. Imagine if Dell had come out first, we might have had a screen with all the options on one layer like WinSock or other TCP/IP setup utilities.
@@svr5423 I’ve had the displeasure of setting-up wifi from the CLI with manually-created config text files, on Linux and BSDs with no WM/DE. Even the guys who do _everything_ on CLI said to just use GNOME’s wifi manager and save the hassle. Now I’m sure it wouldn’t have been quite as bad as that, manually calculating the key from the SSID and password, but I suspect it could’ve been a lot closer to that CLI experience than the modern GUI wifi connection dialog we’ve come to expect (regardless of OS).
@@kaitlyn__L Done that as well. I prefer text files over GUI because it's much easier to handle (backup, version control, comments). For example, in the current iOS gui, if you want to set the wifi interface into access point mode, then you don't do this under the "wifi" setting. And I still haven't found out how to put the interface into ad hoc mode (but I also didn't need it).
I really wish Apple would get back into the router game. I fell in love with their routers about 10 years ago and I still use a 6th gen mesh at home The UI is incredible, incredibly easy to setup with an iphone, menus aren’t too buried
This was a great video, i remember pickong up a used one years later to use with my PowerBook Pismo and surprised with how well it worked. I was just fascinated with the idea of no cables but still being on IRC and chatting with my friends. Good times
Wonderful video production! Excellent storytelling, no drawn out explanations and simple, yet technical descriptions that I believe most people would understand. Animations and music was also of great quality!
Great video. I was challenged to provide wireless connectivity as an IT manager with no budget in the early 2000's. Typical for companies to expect the latest tech at little to no cost such is the life of an IT manager. My solution was to setup a dozen Buffalo WHR-54-G wireless routers configured as access points using DD-WRT firmware. Many of the access points stayed up for over 1 year between reboots. To say it was solid is a huge understatement. Coming out of that project I realized mesh networking was possible with DD-WRT and setup a 4 access point solution at home in the mid 2000's using the mesh capabilities. It was at least 6 years later before ASUS came out with something that could provide higher data rates than 11 mB/s of the 802.11b standard and also provide mesh capability. I kinda got stuck on 802.11b until a competitive mesh solution came out.
I do like DD-WRT and also OpenWRT. I use OpenWRT myself as it support 1000's of commercially available WiFi routers. Several commercial routers are secretly based on OpenWRT.
@@dougkarl3895 Yes OpenWRT is probably the go to firmware today. The German developer who kept the DD-WRT project running in the early days (BrainSlayer on the forums) was very prolific. I believe Buffalo hired him and his releases became less frequent after that. Today I use Ubiquiti hardware at home and at non profits I help.
I remember people coming to my house and seeing me cruise the internet in the very early 2000s and they were like, "Whoa, how are you doing that?" But even seeing it in action most people didn't understand what was really coming and that they would be doing it too with dozens of devices on their own networks in really a pretty short amount of time.
i still am using an Airport in my home, granted its a slightly newer model (the kind that plugs into the wall and looks like a power brick) but its nice to have as a dedicated hidden wifi network for old devices that cannot understand newer wifi standards when i try to take them online
Excellent video! It sure brought back memories for this retired IT person. One of my employers used those WaveLAN PCMCIA cards in their notebooks and access points when I hired on. I ended up replacing the access points with Proxim units. This enabled our sales staff the ability to look up product information from the manufacturers web sites as well as order creation in our POS system. Very high tech for the time.
Very enjoyable documentary, backed by solid research using multiple primary sources. Some contemporary parallels may also be drawn with Apple's inclusion of USB as standard on the iMac and what that did for the fledgling USB ecosystem.
Just to clarify, Apple did not invent WIFI, or set the standards. They were part of a consortium of companies that piggybacked the 802.11 standard for WiFi with the introduction of 802.11b. Many laptops had PCMCIA wireless cards by the end of 99.
This was fascinating, thank you so much for your detail and deep digging. I'm an IT technician who started in the industry around 2010, I've always hated AirPorts for their obnoxious ecosystem dependency whenever I worked with them, but you've given me a new appreciation for their importance in the field.
I live in Columbus and attended OSU. We had some of the biggest Apple labs for student use all over campus! ... I was also a early user of the wave lan card mentioned in this video used those for early "war driving" My fondest memory from all of this was my time working as a Applecare support person here in town. We where contracted to support Apple product's. The training and detail they gave us on the Airport was amazing! It was a magic time! I still use Apple and I am happy that they did so much to move the computing world forward. Thanks for your video!
Nice Doco. Thanks. I am surprised you did not include even a mention about the CSIRO (The Australian Government Scientific Research Org). They pioneered/developed/created alot of the essential technology that got Wireless Networking about the 500Kbit level. They had developed chips that were originally for searching for black holes, and created a system to get rid of echoes (the ultimate limiting factor for Wireless data transmission). Both Apple AND Intel separately attempted to claim the systems were theirs , but after something like 6 years going through the courts, the CSIRO prevailed. But a nice documentary, intriguing, fascinating, and informative. Thanks.
Slick editing, but I really wish you could have consulted with a subject matter expert before posting this. There's a big misrepresentation you made on Barker codes that I really want to clarify. Barker codes don't directly increase data rates! In fact, they count toward the overhead of non-data related bits, so they only decrease them! Barker codes are just sequences of bits that have good autocorrelation properties that let the receiver synchronize itself with a transmitter. This allows for more power-efficient detection methods, which in turn decrease bit errors. Since the same quality of link can now be achieved with less power, the number of bits per symbol can be increased, which is what actually increases the data rate!
What a wonderful video! Very well put together and incredibly interesting to take in. It's so epic to see how the technologies that have changed our lives came about. Wild to think that so few people really appreciate these things.
It always takes a big player to drive the volume to make the price work. What was missing in early wireless that really hampered it was security. At that point most businesses had wired Ethernet everywhere. Early adopters found their networks compromised when simple unsecured wireless "bridges" were added. This was ironed out in short order with continuous improvements and more Ethernet switch type features added as well. Small businesses very quickly walked away from wired networks or if they did implement them they were very small and only for mission critical features and "backhaul". I recall the first Harris 1Mbps wireless products which worked very very well. They found their fit in embedded applications like barcode readers and freight scanners. Eventually bluetooth displaced them and WIFI and WLAN (WIMAX) and finally cellular LTE (3G/4G/5G) coalesced the landscape into logical segments.
One of the things Airports could do before ... well anyone else, was wirelessly bridge 2 networks. I remember in ~2003 using two airports to connect the networks of two offices on different floors of the same building. I also had early WaveLAN Gold and Silver cards. They were so expensive. In my college dorm I put one card in my window and went over into the lawn a few hundred feet away and across the street -- and was able to connect to the network. However, when a car went by the street the signal would drop out. Amazing how fast wireless all changed.
Well done on getting the people who developed and toiled to create these standards that we take for granted on screen to share their stories and wisdom! The production quality of this video is immense
Their impact was East Texas court patent trolling. CSIRO never participated in the 802.11 committee, they werent even aware of it. Patent '069 doesnt cover ANY technology implemented in 802.11b. 069 is Wireless LAN using OFDM, OFDM was invented at Bell Labs in 1966.
@@rasz If it was just patent trolling then I don't think CSIRO wouldn't have been as successful with the lawsuits, as some of the larger companies that were being sued would have fought back. My understanding is that the 802.11 committee used some technology invented by CSIRO and said they'd pay royalties but never ended up doing so.
You seem to have missed the first municipal wifi in existence in your history lesson. A small town called Nassawadox, VA - on top of the local hospital.
I was always a Windows PC guy, but I loved Apple products during the Steve Jobs era, they were built to last with great quality, I still have my iPod Classic and it still works. I had an Airport Extreme Router that worked from 2009 to literally 2022 and I only had to change it out because I upgraded to a faster service. What happened to Apple?
Apple computers still last much longer than most pc’s. Average laptop is 5-7 years old and Macs’s 7 - 11 years. The only thing that suffered was repairability because consumers insist on compact and light.
To clarify... In the year or two before Airport announcement there were "pre-802.11" radios available, the NCR/Lucent's WaveLAN card and also a reference card based on the Harris Semiconductor chip-set. They cost hundreds of dollars each and were basically only purchased by industrial customers who could afford them. They were used in the University and industrial setting and where the Access Point was a simple bridge. There was also no way to support multiple wireless laptops on a single Internet IP address which was essential for dial-up and/or residential broadband. The Airport contained the first residential NAPT NAT router which makes multiple computers to share the same IP address. In summary: Apple committing to a million cards at the $50 price point, built them into the laptop and included the Airport to make it work in the residential setting which made the market.
Have been using AirPort Extreme & express since 2008, still working great. It’s sad that Apple stopped making these. Purchased Unifi nano HD to replace Airport, not happy so far, trying to tune it to see if it can match Airport performance. And backing up using Time Machine is great.
I loved my Airport Extreme base station. When I first got it, I still had dialup, but once I got broadband, I could use that phone port to dial in remotely and use my home internet like an ISP when I was traveling. There's no need for that sort of thing now, but whenever I travel and connect to my home VPN I think back to the handful of times I actually dialed into my home network, in part just because I could. Most hotels had public wifi in the lobby by then, even if you had to pay for it.
I bought one to use with my white ibook G3, it worked very well. I seem to remember the config interface only being a MacOS app. Inside was an Orinoco Gold wifi card and a small board with a 486.
The addition of the dialup modem on the airport base station itself was a very smart move. This put many homes, including multi-computer homes, into position for bringing demand for faster internet and to help grow the market for it.
Back then if you were an Apple Developer you felt like you were a player or fan for the team that kept winning the superbowl. It was annual dominance. I bought some apple stock at $19 pre split… :-)
Great story - well presented and lots of information. The small timeline of products at the end - the AirPort still looks the best, IMHO. Something to be said for concealed antennae
I remember first hearing about this "wireless LAN" technology in the early 2000s. I initially scoffed at it and thought about it similar to how I think of IR-based communication that some laptops and portable devices had at the time. "There's no way it could be fast and reliable enough to actually be useful". We used to run cat5e everywhere to do local LAN parties when in high school, and although 802.11a & b PCI cards existed then, they kinda sucked, and you had to have a free PCI slot (almost everyone used desktops and carried them around). It wasn't until I got my first laptop in 2005 which had a builtin Atheros 802.11b/g chipset (and a desktop Pentium 4... man that thing was like a space heater.. lol) and then started using the beloved Linksys WRT54G(L) wireless routers that I started to change my mind.
I cannot find a live interview call between this guy who knew the actress and how at one party, how she and the composer came up with the idea by accident and helped in the war efforts. Spread spectrum is the term, but the story behind it is far far richer. So amazing to chance upon it again.
It's a fascinating piece of tech. I still remember watching an old 8 Bit Guy video about using Airport Extreme routers for home internet, and that's how I first heard of the product line. My main router at home is still a 2TB Airport Time Capsule and it's really quite good!
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Thanks guys. I think you did a wonderful job telling the story of the early days of WiFi and the Apple Airport, the first residential WiFi router.
I read the first 24 hours of comments and have a couple things to note that may help. One is that right after the Airport was announced several other companies including Dell, Sony, Buffalo, and Lucent followed with their own clones of the Airport; all based on the same NCR/Lucent 802.11b WiFi WaveLAN cards and KarlNet software. Some disagree, but In my humble opinion it is appropriate to credit Apple for making the business commitment and be the first and make the market. Some commented, as the video mentioned, that other companies had competing wireless products prior to 1999, which is true. NCR/Lucent themselves had several pre-802.11 cards since 1991. Our KarlNet software had wireless bridge/routing support since 1993 for as many wireless cards as we could find. Our main product line was outdoor point-to-multi point wireless back-haul. WaveLAN being based on direct sequence spread spectrum as opposed to frequency hopping spread spectrum made it the fastest radio card. As far as I know, prior to the Airport, other companies had only Access Points (bridging only) which would not work in the residential setting where a NAT (Network Address Translation) router is required. The Airport was a NAT router, which all WiFi routers are to this day, and the Airport also included an auto dial-out capability. It is strange to think about it today but back in 1999 few people had broadband, just dial-up. Other than the Airport clones mentioned above, even Linksys didn't come out with their first residential router until 2001. Please let me know if you know of a residential router embedded product in 1999, I want to make sure I have my facts straight. Thanks. Doug Karl.
Doug, I just want to say thanks for pioneering early outdoor wireless backhaul!
I've been working at a WISP for the last 9 years and I wish I was there for the beginning of it all. I've heard a lot of stories from the late 90s about how life changing high speed wireless broadband was to a lot of different people in areas that were underserved by the big telcos. Scrappy companies with home-built equipment running Karlnet and other similar products allowed many areas to get access to broadband years sooner than they would have otherwise. Even today, fixed wireless is still allowing for some fantastic competition with wireline carriers. Thanks again for jump starting it all!
Hey Doug! It’s your nephew! Mom made me watch this the other night. Nice to see how it all came about.
University here had hundreds of Apple airport 802.11b APs with hacked PoE and managed with KarlNet software as early as 2002.
Mr Karl, thank you - Your software was incredible, Airport wouldn't have been possible without it. Truly world changing work. As far as residential routers before 1999? I can't think of any, I was working at a university in the late 90s & the systems department was testing a few wireless products to see about implementing wireless on campus - this was pre-Airport - and none of them would have worked in a home environment, they were all just access points as far as I remember, needing the rest of the infrastructure to operate. And they were slow. Maybe 2 or 5mbps?
I gotta say, as soon as I saw Steve do the "look, no wires!" trick with the iBook, I knew I'd buy my first laptop. It never made sense to me (or not enough sense) to own a laptop computer and still have a tether to the wall. I bought my blueberry RevA iBook, AirPort card, and UFO-style AirPort base station with leftover student loan money.
I remember this presentation. The hula hoop floored me. Vintage Jobs. He could sell anything! I bought the laptop and base station immediately. I remember the moment I took my laptop out on the balcony of my apartment and began to surf the web. I felt like I was floating. It was a profound moment to no longer be tethered to the wall. This product not only did what that claimed , it didn’t perfectly! Ty for the trip down memory lane!
I can only imagine how seeing that presentation must have blown everyone's mind. Something we take so much for granted now, happening for the first time right in front of you. You may not even have realised it at the time, but it would change society immensly
He wasn’t great because “he could sell anything”… he was great because they’d obsess over picking the right products and making them precisely how a user would want them. From there, he could influence the audience easily, because he was excited, and so were you
@@lucasjames8281 Not "how a user would _want_ them", but how the user _WILL_ use them. If you live in the Apple World(tm), you do things the way Apple tells you to. In many ways, it makes Apple's products easier to use - everything is exactly the same. Apple does put a great deal of work into logical, intuitive UI elements.
It was certainly a surprise to anyone who had never seen wireless technology. (which had been around in various forms for several years.) Of course Apple Fans(tm) will drool over it. The simplicity and low cost were worth the drool.
A while back my wife and I found an Airport at a thrift store for $2.99. She said “What does it do?” I just said “networking” without giving it much thought. Now I can show her this. I’m glad I bought a piece of internet history for three bucks!
Not gonna lie… i would’ve bought that too for 3$😂 no use for it but it is a legendary piece of technology
Tell me you bought it!
@@leojavi”I’m glad I bought a piece of internet history for three bucks!” What do you think?
If you haven’t already, you should look at ubiquiti, when Apple shut down the router team they left and formed Ubiquiti and it’s one of the best networking companies around by far
I was there for Airport's debut in 1999, had no idea how much it would change my life... Was at Apple during this period, and from 2000 until 2002, I think half my time was spent educating education market customers about 802.11. After that, it took off like a rocket. Still have my original Airport with it's Wavelan Silver card on display. After almost 25 years, it still looks great! Great video - Thank you!
This video was wonderfully produced. I have to say I found Doug Karl and his work on wireless at OSU fascinating -- I just started an IT career with OSU this past Monday, and I had no idea that OSU was at the forefront of wireless back in the 90s or that one of the biggest contributors to helping Apple start the wireless revolution hails from Central Ohio of all places. I would love to hear more stories from him about his work and of the University!
Not really it was more annoying than ever.
@@BurkenProductionsSays the guy that makes Minecraft videos.
I guess once Doug Karl knew about the bad deal with Apple, he started creating "high performance" Point to Point, Point to Multipoint wireless links and he practically created an industry called WISP, Wireless Internet Service Providers. It really all stated with Lucent Technologies and the IEEE 802.11b and Karl software. He created license for every link, cost of Outdoor routers started from $59 to $299 Dollars. You could change the firmware for Apple, Dell, IBM, HP, Orinoco, Proxim and make them Karl Net capable. His software is way better than anything I've seen today. The diagnostics where excellent. I was able to use mi laptop with a small antenna and have internet at distance of more than 60 Km.
I think he left a comment in this video a few days ago
I play the game osu and I was VERY confused at this forgetting the concept of abbreviations
It’s unfortunate Apple no longer makes Airport routers. They were some of the most reliable and easy to set up units I’ve ever used.
And the express was, besides an excellent router, also a great way to get a home hifi to play tunes over the network. rip
Those things were so good.@@kaitlyn__L
@@kaitlyn__L dead simple to add a network printer too.
Just retired mine finally last year and sold them on eBay. Spent $700 on a new setup and long story short, i'm looking for more airports on eBay. Nothing compares when it comes to how dead reliable they are.
I agree. I still use Airport Extremes. I have a mesh network setup using them. You can setup a mesh network you just have to do it manually. I'll use them for as long as I possibly can.
I remember when an Airport was installed in my 4th grade classroom right around 2000, and we got our first iBooks to play with. We were pretty lucky to have such cutting edge computers, but I don't think anyone (including myself) really appreciated the wireless capability for a few more years.
I remember being blown away by the concept of having wireless internet on a mobile device. Having the ability to surf the web and watch videos on a couch or on your bed was insane to me at the time lol
Same here! 6th grade in 2002 we had airport and IBooks in our classroom. Although we thought it was cool, we didn’t appreciate how cutting edge the technology was.
The AirPort doing dial-up automatically when you connect to it is such a nice touch. It's already all impressive new technology, but they went the extra bit to make it simple to use even if all you had was dial-up and its measly 56kbit/s didn't do 802.11b's whopping 11Mbit/s any justice. They could have shown stupid fast wireless file transfers between two iBooks, but they understood that the real big deal was accessing the Internet, wirelessly, and that would often be a single client and dial-up Internet. It could have so easily been overlooked.
It was funny how Apple still built analogue modems into their products when analogue telephony networks have become extinct. But you couldn't get apple with ISDN.
At the time there was very little broadband. DSL and Cable Modem were just starting to be deployed. It was unclear at the time 1998/1999 who would be able to use the Ethernet port. However, we made NAT work on either the serial PPP dial out port or the Ethernet port for the lucky few who eventually had broadband.
@@svr5423isdn wasn't really a thing in the US. Different story in Europe ;)
Like @dougkarl3895 said, ADSL, was something new that was just starting to be implemented. I was working for Corning ( Yes the Fibre Optics guys ), back then, we where manufacturing and shipping millings of ADSL filters per month. The filters had to be installed at the TELCO and SOHO , it was just a crazy fast idea that was implemented super fast.
Now to be fair, I think the 56 Kbps was more like 115 Kbps because the modem was doing compression. The Airport was using a Conexant RP56D Chipset ( Ext Rockwell International ) modem. ADSL back then was about 128Kbps, only a few had over 1Mbps. Just look at the video when Steve Jobs was connecting to CNN... That was blazing fast LOL.
Kalnet did a great job back then. If you wanted something similar you had to use a PC with WinGate or WinProxy, and that was using wire, plus think on the cost.
@@tschuuuls486 Even in Europe, ISDN wasn't that big outside of the audio broadcasting world. Most households had analog, then ADSL for data and analog for voice, then VoIP.
I loved seeing HomeRF mentioned. Before the recession following the 9/11 attacks, I was contracting for Siemens. We were working on launching a HomeRF ADSL router in conjunction with AT&T, Proxim, and Netopia. It also had cordless phones that could do up to 4 voice lines with VoDSL connecting to the same basestation as the PCs with their wireless cards. All over HomeRF. It was miles better than 802.11b and was out first. Compaq and Intel used to offer HomeRF equipment. But the licenses for manufacturers were expensive and there was basically only one chipmaker - Proxim - who also sold routers and wireless cards. Making it less attractive knowing you had to compete against your only chipmaker. As soon as 802.11b became widespread, HomeRF died a quick death and I was laid off.
I used some Intel branded HomeRF cards in the early '00s while in high school. It was a very cool tech. I used these cards with a small LAN and had Win98SE (and later XP) Internet Connection Sharing to share my family's dial up access with a few other systems.
This is a recurring theme in tech. It doesn’t really matter how good a product is. The ones that succeed and end up enshrined in history are the ones that somebody has the guts to submit to a standards body, rather than try to keep it to themselves.
This has been the best documentary I've watched on the tech industry in a very long time.
I used to work for the W-Fi Alliance, my job was to sit all day, with an engineer from the a company making a product. Well I did just that in 2003 for the AirPort Extreme. It ran 802.11G. All day we ran tests, took traces. You see, Apple used a lot of off the shelf stuff inside. They were using a Broadcom chipset. They HAD to know, from their internal tests, the problem I already knew that chipset has working with the other devices. They choose the cheaper one, so I failed them when the tests didn’t pass. I set them back for release by at least a few months because they already had like a million made waiting in Taiwan , to stamp “Wi-Certified” on the box.
I seriously doubt Steve Job was happy. There’s nothing he could have done though. I wasn’t about to risk my job
Great video !!
As an IT person myself and always watching computer technology history, I wonder why I never knew this
lol the crowd going ballistic because of wifi. Never saw that clip. Genius. I just remember as a kid, wow what a world we live in, we now have wireless internet. And how far we have come. Deployment with current cloud options have become a joy for all.
Apple’s adoption of it really was “the revolution.” I wasn’t even an “Apple Guy”, but the Apple AirPort router was *by far* the cheapest 802.11b access point on the market. Everything else was high-end corporate gear for $1000+ that was *JUST* an access point. Apple’s was an access point and router in one, with a modem for dial-up for home use that didn’t have broadband yet.
I worked at Intel at the time, and had bought a Lucent WaveLAN card for my Windows computer, and an Apple AirPort base station. I had commented to my boss at Intel about how great it was, and he had me bring them in to demo them (note: personal equipment was strictly forbidden in the building I worked in; my boss had to personally sign it in at security.) He loved it, and promptly bought Apple AirPort base stations for our department, and WaveLAN cards for our laptops. He strategically placed one base station so that it reached the lunch room. It meant having this clearly Apple badged device very visible from a major hallway.
Thank you for clarifying, I was sitting here thinking "st00pid apple hype" but your comment really put this matter in perspective, in a manner in which I can appreciate Apple's contribution.
@@DJRonnieGApple has always been good at recognizing great ideas with lackluster implementation
I am actually the great X9 grand son of the owner of NCR John Patterson. Thank you for giving the company its proper credit for the cash register! While he did not start the company, which wasn’t called NCR at that point, he acquired the designs for the cash register and patented them, he didn’t pay a lot of money for the designs if I remember correctly as the inventor wasn’t that interested in taking it to market. So with that be bought the designs and the rights to sell it effectively selling him the business. NCR went on to be known for its influence in the formation of IBM the classic competitor of the company. They both played massive roles in the early days of digital technology and NCR also played a significant role in the industrial revolution and helped bring much change to factory work.
NCR, as noted in the video, also created the SCSI disk interface standard which was VERY popular interface for most all non-IBMPC's and quite widespread until recent years.
@@dougkarl3895 yes it’s definitely one of their rather interesting things that happened in the history of the company!
The production quality of this video is amazing! I'm really surprised you don't have more subscribers.
Thank you, for this outstanding video. As a person with a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering, a Senior Member of IEEE, and an Apple home computer user since 1996, I did not know most of the information presented. Now in my early 60's, I have tried to share with my younger co-workers just, how truly revolutionary Apple's wireless Airport Card and base station was. But, sadly because it is so common place today, they think wireless computer communication in the home has always been around. The four (4) sided chart of Steve Jobs product division was really set in the year 2000, when all four (4) computer models both desktop and laptop each supported Airport Cards (smile...smile).
Thank you for archiving the legacy of people who were there and alive
I was gifted a classic airport when I was about 12 years old, I remember using it for the first time with 56k dialing up from my iBook and having the internet on the couch. What a time to be alive.
I still remember when the AirPort was presented at an Apple Day in Munich (the day after Cupertino). We all were quite astonished. Even more when we asked for the price. And most of all, the AirPort connected to ISDN (ADSL in Germany at those times) and even better, it supported 1TR6, the predecessor of ISDN. As soon as it was available to buy, I had it. Easy setup, maybe a few hickups over the years I used it.
Great product, great memories! Thanks for reminding me.
That was quite something to see the Doug Karl segment. I came across KarlBridge in the past few years attempting to do something with my "retro network". Great video.
I'd gotten some of their KarlBridge boxes at the Michigan State University salvage store circa 2005. I wish I'd kept them!
@@compu85 I probably have over a hundred units Lucent OR, ROR, COR, Apple with the software modification and the pigtail coming out, Orinoco, Proxim, Dell. All running Karlnet with the Karlnet License.
Very informative and fascinating. Back then I worked for an ISP ironically and recall my boss getting the Airport when it first came out. Had worked with some wireless communications and early wisp gear before but it was finicky. The Airport like most things Apple was the first to kinda just work out of the box while everyone else still needed a console cable. That said the original Lucent card I had from that era that came out of an access point I think with it's external antenna port and hot radio that could be put in promiscuous mode was a war drivers dream. This whole series brings back memories. Working for the ISP was overall my all time favorite job.
The algorithm failed me big time! How am I only discovering your channel now?
Great narration and production value
Amazing report. I remember in the early days of DSL we home phone lines that would do home networking. Wi-Fi was still very exotic in the early 2000s. Home networking really wasn't a well understood concept for dial up because whatever computer you were using would just dial up directly, but with laptops getting cheaper, and with broadband access, it became necessary to connect more devices faster at once. Since dropping Ethernet is a difficult project, Wi-Fi became the major player. If you have the time for it though, performance gains can still be found with a wired connection with things like your TV and computer spaces.
I did just this after fibre was installed at home. I ran an Ethernet cable from the Wifi router to my office. I get 300Mbps Wifi and 1.2Gbps wired.
Another extraordinary video. Thank you for making this. I remember watching that keynote where Steve walked away from the table with the iBooks in his hand. I could not believe what I was seeing. I'd certainly had exposure to wireless networking at my university campus 10 years earlier (they used some sort of short-range radio or infrared thing between buildings), but I had never seen it in a consumer product. Hats off to everyone involved, truly and gratefully, but my particular hat is tipped to Steve Jobs. His ability to foresee a future where the major disrupter was "convenience" brought so much we take for granted today.
Honestly, I’m glad Apple set the standard for how easy the connection UI should be. Imagine if Dell had come out first, we might have had a screen with all the options on one layer like WinSock or other TCP/IP setup utilities.
Tell me, what standard did it set?
Given that they were neither the first nor present in significant numbers both in commercial and private markets.
@@svr5423 the interview with the second guy is what I’m referring to, I suggest you rewatch his sections about developing the UI for ease of use
@@kaitlyn__L I'll have a look. But in general, the current apple wifi gui is more than confusing and lacks options. Haven't seen any really good ones.
@@svr5423 I’ve had the displeasure of setting-up wifi from the CLI with manually-created config text files, on Linux and BSDs with no WM/DE. Even the guys who do _everything_ on CLI said to just use GNOME’s wifi manager and save the hassle.
Now I’m sure it wouldn’t have been quite as bad as that, manually calculating the key from the SSID and password, but I suspect it could’ve been a lot closer to that CLI experience than the modern GUI wifi connection dialog we’ve come to expect (regardless of OS).
@@kaitlyn__L Done that as well. I prefer text files over GUI because it's much easier to handle (backup, version control, comments).
For example, in the current iOS gui, if you want to set the wifi interface into access point mode, then you don't do this under the "wifi" setting. And I still haven't found out how to put the interface into ad hoc mode (but I also didn't need it).
I really wish Apple would get back into the router game. I fell in love with their routers about 10 years ago and I still use a 6th gen mesh at home
The UI is incredible, incredibly easy to setup with an iphone, menus aren’t too buried
This was a great video, i remember pickong up a used one years later to use with my PowerBook Pismo and surprised with how well it worked. I was just fascinated with the idea of no cables but still being on IRC and chatting with my friends. Good times
What a great video, with excellent interview clips! We are indebted to these folks, such amazing innovations
Wonderful video production! Excellent storytelling, no drawn out explanations and simple, yet technical descriptions that I believe most people would understand.
Animations and music was also of great quality!
I had a proxim system back in the 90's. It was very cool to have way back then.
That must have crazy. My laptop was plugged into a phone line
TH-cam buffered for me at exactly 24:19 which is some insanely perfect comedic timing
Oh hell yeah, new Serial Port
thanks to everyone who helped changed the digital wireless spectrum to make communication and lives for the better.
CSIRO here in Australia solved all the problems and produced the first workable solution early 1990's.
Surprised there was no mention of it. They own the WiFi patent after all, not Apple.
Come on. Apple invented the smartphone! 😂 Surely they invented wifi routers too, no? (This is a joke, for those who actually believe they did.)
@@TradieTrevindeed!
@@TradieTrevBecause Apple invented everything. Don't you know that?
citation needed.
Great video.
I was challenged to provide wireless connectivity as an IT manager with no budget in the early 2000's. Typical for companies to expect the latest tech at little to no cost such is the life of an IT manager. My solution was to setup a dozen Buffalo WHR-54-G wireless routers configured as access points using DD-WRT firmware. Many of the access points stayed up for over 1 year between reboots. To say it was solid is a huge understatement.
Coming out of that project I realized mesh networking was possible with DD-WRT and setup a 4 access point solution at home in the mid 2000's using the mesh capabilities. It was at least 6 years later before ASUS came out with something that could provide higher data rates than 11 mB/s of the 802.11b standard and also provide mesh capability. I kinda got stuck on 802.11b until a competitive mesh solution came out.
I do like DD-WRT and also OpenWRT. I use OpenWRT myself as it support 1000's of commercially available WiFi routers. Several commercial routers are secretly based on OpenWRT.
@@dougkarl3895 Yes OpenWRT is probably the go to firmware today. The German developer who kept the DD-WRT project running in the early days (BrainSlayer on the forums) was very prolific. I believe Buffalo hired him and his releases became less frequent after that. Today I use Ubiquiti hardware at home and at non profits I help.
I remember people coming to my house and seeing me cruise the internet in the very early 2000s and they were like, "Whoa, how are you doing that?" But even seeing it in action most people didn't understand what was really coming and that they would be doing it too with dozens of devices on their own networks in really a pretty short amount of time.
i still am using an Airport in my home, granted its a slightly newer model (the kind that plugs into the wall and looks like a power brick) but its nice to have as a dedicated hidden wifi network for old devices that cannot understand newer wifi standards when i try to take them online
Excellent video! It sure brought back memories for this retired IT person. One of my employers used those WaveLAN PCMCIA cards in their notebooks and access points when I hired on. I ended up replacing the access points with Proxim units. This enabled our sales staff the ability to look up product information from the manufacturers web sites as well as order creation in our POS system. Very high tech for the time.
This channel is criminally underrated
I remember conmecting to wifi for the first time, feeling like it was magic.
Thank you for showing the history that started it all ❤
Wow. I had no idea about the history of this and had no idea Apple was even involved, let alone had an early AP with a 56K modem. That's crazy.
What an outstanding report on the things we now take for granted! Thank you for producing.
Very enjoyable documentary, backed by solid research using multiple primary sources.
Some contemporary parallels may also be drawn with Apple's inclusion of USB as standard on the iMac and what that did for the fledgling USB ecosystem.
Just to clarify, Apple did not invent WIFI, or set the standards. They were part of a consortium of companies that piggybacked the 802.11 standard for WiFi with the introduction of 802.11b. Many laptops had PCMCIA wireless cards by the end of 99.
This was fascinating, thank you so much for your detail and deep digging. I'm an IT technician who started in the industry around 2010, I've always hated AirPorts for their obnoxious ecosystem dependency whenever I worked with them, but you've given me a new appreciation for their importance in the field.
The quality of this video for this small of a channel is insane. Well done
I live in Columbus and attended OSU. We had some of the biggest Apple labs for student use all over campus! ... I was also a early user of the wave lan card mentioned in this video used those for early "war driving" My fondest memory from all of this was my time working as a Applecare support person here in town. We where contracted to support Apple product's. The training and detail they gave us on the Airport was amazing! It was a magic time! I still use Apple and I am happy that they did so much to move the computing world forward. Thanks for your video!
Nice Doco. Thanks.
I am surprised you did not include even a mention about the CSIRO (The Australian Government Scientific Research Org). They pioneered/developed/created alot of the essential technology that got Wireless Networking about the 500Kbit level.
They had developed chips that were originally for searching for black holes, and created a system to get rid of echoes (the ultimate limiting factor for Wireless data transmission). Both Apple AND Intel separately attempted to claim the systems were theirs , but after something like 6 years going through the courts, the CSIRO prevailed. But a nice documentary, intriguing, fascinating, and informative.
Thanks.
Slick editing, but I really wish you could have consulted with a subject matter expert before posting this. There's a big misrepresentation you made on Barker codes that I really want to clarify.
Barker codes don't directly increase data rates! In fact, they count toward the overhead of non-data related bits, so they only decrease them! Barker codes are just sequences of bits that have good autocorrelation properties that let the receiver synchronize itself with a transmitter. This allows for more power-efficient detection methods, which in turn decrease bit errors. Since the same quality of link can now be achieved with less power, the number of bits per symbol can be increased, which is what actually increases the data rate!
What a wonderful video! Very well put together and incredibly interesting to take in. It's so epic to see how the technologies that have changed our lives came about. Wild to think that so few people really appreciate these things.
Excellent video! I didn't realize Apple had such a huge impact on wifi technology
Thank you so much for the video - so happy that I found it. Brings back memories
So cool to see the people involved in this massively accepted technology, thank you for sharing.
Nice work. Great to see you using KDE, too.
This was truly fascinating. I never thought I'd be enthralled with a 30 minute video about wireless netowrking - bravo!
For how important that iBook / Airport demo is, I really wish we had a better quality version of it available.
Thank you for not rewriting past history, especially the pictures of the group
Amazing video, props for the great storytelling, editing and research! One of the few channels I have subscribed after watching just one video
It always takes a big player to drive the volume to make the price work. What was missing in early wireless that really hampered it was security. At that point most businesses had wired Ethernet everywhere. Early adopters found their networks compromised when simple unsecured wireless "bridges" were added. This was ironed out in short order with continuous improvements and more Ethernet switch type features added as well. Small businesses very quickly walked away from wired networks or if they did implement them they were very small and only for mission critical features and "backhaul". I recall the first Harris 1Mbps wireless products which worked very very well. They found their fit in embedded applications like barcode readers and freight scanners. Eventually bluetooth displaced them and WIFI and WLAN (WIMAX) and finally cellular LTE (3G/4G/5G) coalesced the landscape into logical segments.
wow amazing documentary, love the style! keep up the great work
One of the things Airports could do before ... well anyone else, was wirelessly bridge 2 networks. I remember in ~2003 using two airports to connect the networks of two offices on different floors of the same building. I also had early WaveLAN Gold and Silver cards. They were so expensive. In my college dorm I put one card in my window and went over into the lawn a few hundred feet away and across the street -- and was able to connect to the network. However, when a car went by the street the signal would drop out. Amazing how fast wireless all changed.
The best IT documentaries in the world.
More of that please....
Well done on getting the people who developed and toiled to create these standards that we take for granted on screen to share their stories and wisdom! The production quality of this video is immense
Great story. I still own my original graphite AirPort Base Station, because it was such a defining product.
What an absolute masterpiece. I hope you get more recognition soon!
Extremely polished documentary. I loved it!
Thank you!
Awesome story! Thank you so much for telling it 🙂
As a student EE this was really well writen and produced. Liked and subbed 👍🏼
What a fantastic video, keep up the amazing work!!
Thank you for sharing this, I really enjoyed it!
Great documentary, enjoyed watching it and learned a thing or two about the history in the process. Thank you!
Really compelling documentary, thanks!
Great video, great documentary research. Congratulations.
I mounted AirPorts to the walls of lower school classrooms. The kids loved them - called them little flying saucers!
I'm really surprised you didn't mention the CSIRO in Australia. They had a major impact yet weren't mentioned at all.
Their impact was East Texas court patent trolling. CSIRO never participated in the 802.11 committee, they werent even aware of it. Patent '069 doesnt cover ANY technology implemented in 802.11b. 069 is Wireless LAN using OFDM, OFDM was invented at Bell Labs in 1966.
@@rasz If it was just patent trolling then I don't think CSIRO wouldn't have been as successful with the lawsuits, as some of the larger companies that were being sued would have fought back. My understanding is that the 802.11 committee used some technology invented by CSIRO and said they'd pay royalties but never ended up doing so.
@@Daniel15au 802.11b uses DSSS modulation. Zero overlap with 069 CSIRO patent even if it was legit.
You seem to have missed the first municipal wifi in existence in your history lesson.
A small town called Nassawadox, VA - on top of the local hospital.
AirPort Time Capsule still being utilised sadly only as a Time Machine device, one of the better Apple devices I’ve bought!
I used to have a airport time capsule. It was so useful for making backups and hadnt failed on me once.
What an absolutely great historical review. Thanks for all your hard work!
I was always a Windows PC guy, but I loved Apple products during the Steve Jobs era, they were built to last with great quality, I still have my iPod Classic and it still works. I had an Airport Extreme Router that worked from 2009 to literally 2022 and I only had to change it out because I upgraded to a faster service. What happened to Apple?
Greed, shareholders want more money.
Apple computers still last much longer than most pc’s.
Average laptop is 5-7 years old and Macs’s 7 - 11 years. The only thing that suffered was repairability because consumers insist on compact and light.
Most of my MacBooks still outlive various ThinkPads and work provided machines 🤷♂
Now that's a documentary! Thank you for it!
Really enjoyed this amazing video and honestly I never knew apple was the first with WiFi.
To clarify... In the year or two before Airport announcement there were "pre-802.11" radios available, the NCR/Lucent's WaveLAN card and also a reference card based on the Harris Semiconductor chip-set. They cost hundreds of dollars each and were basically only purchased by industrial customers who could afford them. They were used in the University and industrial setting and where the Access Point was a simple bridge. There was also no way to support multiple wireless laptops on a single Internet IP address which was essential for dial-up and/or residential broadband. The Airport contained the first residential NAPT NAT router which makes multiple computers to share the same IP address. In summary: Apple committing to a million cards at the $50 price point, built them into the laptop and included the Airport to make it work in the residential setting which made the market.
It's great how you are getting interviews with the original players.
Have been using AirPort Extreme & express since 2008, still working great.
It’s sad that Apple stopped making these.
Purchased Unifi nano HD to replace Airport, not happy so far, trying to tune it to see if it can match Airport performance.
And backing up using Time Machine is great.
I loved my Airport Extreme base station. When I first got it, I still had dialup, but once I got broadband, I could use that phone port to dial in remotely and use my home internet like an ISP when I was traveling. There's no need for that sort of thing now, but whenever I travel and connect to my home VPN I think back to the handful of times I actually dialed into my home network, in part just because I could. Most hotels had public wifi in the lobby by then, even if you had to pay for it.
This was spectacular work. Take a bow. Subscribed!
i still use AirPort with 2TB disk and i just love it! is still better than many newer devices. its painfull that they dont make it anymore
I bought one to use with my white ibook G3, it worked very well. I seem to remember the config interface only being a MacOS app. Inside was an Orinoco Gold wifi card and a small board with a 486.
The addition of the dialup modem on the airport base station itself was a very smart move. This put many homes, including multi-computer homes, into position for bringing demand for faster internet and to help grow the market for it.
This is so unexpectedly high effort and amazing.
Back then if you were an Apple
Developer you felt like you were a player or fan for the team that kept winning the superbowl. It was annual dominance.
I bought some apple stock at $19 pre split… :-)
Great story - well presented and lots of information. The small timeline of products at the end - the AirPort still looks the best, IMHO. Something to be said for concealed antennae
What an incredible story - and amazing video. Well done!
I remember first hearing about this "wireless LAN" technology in the early 2000s. I initially scoffed at it and thought about it similar to how I think of IR-based communication that some laptops and portable devices had at the time. "There's no way it could be fast and reliable enough to actually be useful". We used to run cat5e everywhere to do local LAN parties when in high school, and although 802.11a & b PCI cards existed then, they kinda sucked, and you had to have a free PCI slot (almost everyone used desktops and carried them around). It wasn't until I got my first laptop in 2005 which had a builtin Atheros 802.11b/g chipset (and a desktop Pentium 4... man that thing was like a space heater.. lol) and then started using the beloved Linksys WRT54G(L) wireless routers that I started to change my mind.
I cannot find a live interview call between this guy who knew the actress and how at one party, how she and the composer came up with the idea by accident and helped in the war efforts. Spread spectrum is the term, but the story behind it is far far richer. So amazing to chance upon it again.
I need more documentaries like this
It's a fascinating piece of tech. I still remember watching an old 8 Bit Guy video about using Airport Extreme routers for home internet, and that's how I first heard of the product line. My main router at home is still a 2TB Airport Time Capsule and it's really quite good!
This was awesome. I remember airport back in the day. Nostalgia
This channel is so underrated.