Thank you, orinoco_cs

[David Gibson]

On Wed, Sep 25, 2002 at 02:29:10PM +1000, Bruce Janson wrote:
>     ...
>     From: David Gibson <david at gibson.dropbear.id.au>
>     ...
>     Date: Wed, 25 Sep 2002 11:40:05 +1000
>     ...
>     On Tue, Sep 24, 2002 at 04:15:19PM -0700, Jim Carter wrote:
>     ...
>     > Wavelan is a registered trademark of NCR Corporation (I think), formerly
>     > National Cash Register Corp., which was swallowed by AT&T (I think it was
>     > before Lucent and ended up in the Lucent spinoff). This was their line of
>     > very early wireless cards at 1 Mb/s using I think a proprietary protocol.
>     ...
>     As far as the cards themselves go - originally there was the Lucent
>     WaveLAN IEEE cards.  These were later rebranded as ORiNOCO cards.  At
>     some point the part of Lucent responsible for the firmware was spun
>     off into Agere, but (afaik) they don't make cards themselves.
>     Currently ORiNOCO branded cards and Avaya cards both exist, and are
>     essentially identical.
>     
>     The IEEE is responsible for the 802.11 standards.
>     ...
> 
> Jim, David,
>     I think the WaveLAN IEEE cards were actually a slightly later version
> of the "original" cards, perhaps the half-length cards as opposed to the
> full-length cards.
> The early WaveLAN ISA (and, if memory serves, PCMCIA and/or PCI) cards
> signalled at 2 Mbits/s, and one could certainly achieve a reasonable
> fraction of that rate: easily 1.6 Mbits/s using very low-powered PCs
> and unoptimised code at both ends of a point-to-point link.  Though the
> protocol was "proprietary" there was little of it.  The cards included
> an Intel 82586 ethernet controller and just sent (slightly encapsulated)
> ethernet packets over the air.  Of course, 802.11* has fixed that :-).

I don't believe so.  I'm pretty sure the "WaveLAN IEE" cards have
always been 802.11 cards (hence the name) and AFAIK they have always
been PCMCIA cards.  They actually have very little in common with the
WaveLAN ISA cards, a source of much confusion.

-- 
David Gibson			| For every complex problem there is a
david at gibson.dropbear.id.au	| solution which is simple, neat and
				| wrong.
http://www.ozlabs.org/people/dgibson