Losing the Signal: The Spectacular Rise and Fall of BlackBerry by Jacquie McNish, Sean Silcoff Read Free Book Online

translate the Babel of network languages with custom software that many companies didn’t bother. Early innovations by a surfing fanatic in Hawaii would prove instrumental in bridging the wireless data gap.
    Norman Abramson left his job teaching engineering and physics at Harvard University in the late 1960s to accept a job at the University of Hawaii that put him within walking distance of the ocean. Abramson loved surfing, but he made his reputation riding airwaves. As head of a campus research project, Abramson created a wireless network based on radio signals that solved a local communications problem with University of Hawaii computers scattered among its campuses on four islands. Underwater telephone cables connecting the islands were expensive and not always reliable.
    Abramson’s solution was ALOHAnet, a network of software and equipment that radiated coded messages over radio signals. The advent of computers and digital communications made it possible to modulate radio waves, once shaped to convey the dashes and dots of Morse code, to relay digital bits known as 1s and 0s. This binary code was so efficiently processed that it was possible to relay data at faster speeds.
    Ham radio enthusiasts had tinkered with radio-based digital data transmissions for years, but radio channels were scarce and the capacity for conveying large blocks of data over long distances was limited. The biggest problem with traditional analog radio channels was that they were so busy and noisy that data messages were at risk of being lost or so corrupted they were unreadable. ALOHAnet solved these problems by dividing data into coded packets. Each packet held a portion of the user’s message and instructions about the destination and sequence in which the packet was to be arranged with other parts of the message when they arrived. If a channel was busy, packets were programmed to wait, like cars obeying a red light. As soon as a channel opened
—green light
—some packets continued their journey, a process that was repeated until all packets arrived. In the early 1970s, long before most people had heard of the Internet, Abramson and his colleagues were sending and receiving e-mails from various university campuses on their wireless network. 4 It would be years before the concept was commercialized.
    Motorola and IBM joined forces in 1983 to create a two-way radio network for the computer maker’s service technicians. The first commercial data network seemed an ideal partnership. IBM could keep tabs on roaming technicians; Motorola now had a blue chip customer to vouch for its breakthrough service and transmission equipment. IBM technicians were issued portable terminals. Initially, an IBM phone operator took customer orders, then routed computer messages in short, coded messages to the nearest technician. The device sped up IBM service response, but the experiment was costly and offered limited message capacity. The terminals sold for as much as $3,700 a pop, and there were access fees and messaging costs. 5 Few other businesses signed up for the service after they commercialized it in 1990. In 1994, IBM sold its 50 percent stake in the business back to Motorola.
    Until the 1990s, wireless data networks were seen as a great engineering adventure that offered little commercial potential. It was an old story. Communication innovators often didn’t know what they had. Alexander Graham Bell was so convinced his pioneering telephone would be such an unwanted intrusion that he initially promoted his invention in the 1880s at expositions and fairs as an entertainment system that conveyed music and theatrical performances over headphones to those who couldn’t afford to buy tickets to the real thing. 6 Similarly, it would take years and hundreds of millions of dollars of investment in wireless data research and many wrong turns to convince the market that wireless data was a worthwhile service. In themeantime, there were enough profits to be