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Symbol Technologies
Symbol Technologies, Inc., was an American manufacturer and supplier of mobile data capture and delivery equipment. The company specialized in barcode scanners, mobile computers, RFID systems and Wireless LAN infrastructure.
Symbol was acquired by Motorola in 2007. In 2014, the enterprise hardware division of Motorola Solutions containing the Symbol line of products was acquired by Zebra Technologies.
The company was co-founded in 1973 by Jerome Swartz and physicist Shelley A. Harrison, originally under the name Stony Brook Applied Research. At that time, the company focused on handheld laser-based scanning of bar codes. Under Swartz, the company marketed handheld laser barcode scanning devices. The company focused heavily on the retail industry and began to get involved in inventory management. These activities typically required people to scan items where they are stored and as such needed to be mobile. Symbol began to make small computers that could store data scanned to take inventory counts remotely and then upload the information gathered to a host system. This was the rationale for the September 1988 purchase of MSI Data Corporation, a mobile computer company headquartered in southern California, for $120 million.
The mobile computers being manufactured at the time relied on static memory (in this case SRAM) for execution space and general storage. SRAM was extremely expensive and the team determined that it would be an improvement to use a radio to allow the mobile computer to be untethered but connected to the host system. A thin client architecture was adopted in conjunction with a spread spectrum radio network.
The enterprise mobility management market was dominated by Symbol Technologies and Telxon, Inc. Most notably, these two companies serviced major retailers such as Wal-Mart, Kroger, Safeway, Federated and others.[citation needed]
A notable turning point occurred in 1994 with a competition for business at Kroger. Symbol Technologies and Telxon were operating radio networks in the 2.4 GHz ISM bands. IEEE 802.11 was not yet ratified, so Symbol and Telxon were free to define competing standards of communication at this frequency band. Symbol settled on frequency hopping as the most robust, agile and interference-tolerant approach to data communications while Telxon selected direct sequence technology which they felt afforded higher transfer speeds with adequate interference immunity. Kroger ordered a head-to-head comparison test. Ultimately and not decisively, Kroger chose Telxon. At about the same time, the IEEE decided to adopt the direct sequence approach in its IEEE 802.11b standard.[citation needed]
The ratification of IEEE 802.11b was a huge blow to the Symbol team which now had to reconfigure and engineer a direct sequence radio system. This was accomplished with great pains and IEEE 802.11b became a reality in the industrial and commercial markets far before the radios were available to the consumer market.[citation needed]
The addition of a radio to a mobile device was roughly estimated to have a real value of between $500 and $1000 per unit. This was paid by enterprise customers that desperately needed this feature to accomplish their operations.[citation needed]
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Symbol Technologies
Symbol Technologies, Inc., was an American manufacturer and supplier of mobile data capture and delivery equipment. The company specialized in barcode scanners, mobile computers, RFID systems and Wireless LAN infrastructure.
Symbol was acquired by Motorola in 2007. In 2014, the enterprise hardware division of Motorola Solutions containing the Symbol line of products was acquired by Zebra Technologies.
The company was co-founded in 1973 by Jerome Swartz and physicist Shelley A. Harrison, originally under the name Stony Brook Applied Research. At that time, the company focused on handheld laser-based scanning of bar codes. Under Swartz, the company marketed handheld laser barcode scanning devices. The company focused heavily on the retail industry and began to get involved in inventory management. These activities typically required people to scan items where they are stored and as such needed to be mobile. Symbol began to make small computers that could store data scanned to take inventory counts remotely and then upload the information gathered to a host system. This was the rationale for the September 1988 purchase of MSI Data Corporation, a mobile computer company headquartered in southern California, for $120 million.
The mobile computers being manufactured at the time relied on static memory (in this case SRAM) for execution space and general storage. SRAM was extremely expensive and the team determined that it would be an improvement to use a radio to allow the mobile computer to be untethered but connected to the host system. A thin client architecture was adopted in conjunction with a spread spectrum radio network.
The enterprise mobility management market was dominated by Symbol Technologies and Telxon, Inc. Most notably, these two companies serviced major retailers such as Wal-Mart, Kroger, Safeway, Federated and others.[citation needed]
A notable turning point occurred in 1994 with a competition for business at Kroger. Symbol Technologies and Telxon were operating radio networks in the 2.4 GHz ISM bands. IEEE 802.11 was not yet ratified, so Symbol and Telxon were free to define competing standards of communication at this frequency band. Symbol settled on frequency hopping as the most robust, agile and interference-tolerant approach to data communications while Telxon selected direct sequence technology which they felt afforded higher transfer speeds with adequate interference immunity. Kroger ordered a head-to-head comparison test. Ultimately and not decisively, Kroger chose Telxon. At about the same time, the IEEE decided to adopt the direct sequence approach in its IEEE 802.11b standard.[citation needed]
The ratification of IEEE 802.11b was a huge blow to the Symbol team which now had to reconfigure and engineer a direct sequence radio system. This was accomplished with great pains and IEEE 802.11b became a reality in the industrial and commercial markets far before the radios were available to the consumer market.[citation needed]
The addition of a radio to a mobile device was roughly estimated to have a real value of between $500 and $1000 per unit. This was paid by enterprise customers that desperately needed this feature to accomplish their operations.[citation needed]