TAP vs. SMS

You probably caught it on the news this morning. The story usually starts with "Happy Birthday SMS."  I don't know how kids would abbreviate that today but I'm sure they do. The news stories all quote the first SMS message back in 1992.

"The first SMS message was sent over the Vodafone GSM network in the United Kingdom on 3 December 1992, from Neil Papworth of Sema Group (now Mavenir Systems) using a personal computer to Richard Jarvis of Vodafone using an Orbitel 901 handset. The text of the message was "Merry Christmas."

America didn't text anyone for another six months when Brennan Hayden, an engineer working for Aldiscon  testing their brand new SMS system sent a test message to his boss literally just the word "burp." It speaks volumes about cultural differences. [Source] It's a pretty nifty tech story but it totally skips over all the technological progress that it took to get there. In technology, the struggle is the glory and SMS (Short Message Service) wasn't the first telephony texting protocol by a long shot. 

But there wasn't much innovation in SMS in the first place. Prior to the innovations that allowed us to broadcast voice, we were all sending text by Morse Code be it by cable or wireless. What's really new in SMS is carrying the data via phone protocols over CDMA (Code division multiple access). It was predated by at least half a dozen different text standards for phone: V.21 in Sweden, Bell 103, Turbo Code, and Baudot in the USA, EDT (European Deaf Telephone) in Italy and Spain, V.23 in France, V.18 in the UK and others. Most of those are derived from TTY (Teletype) and worked with 5-bit Baudot code, some used DTMF, but they all worked.

The one that could have beaten out SMS was TAP, the Telocator Alphanumeric Protocol. It was also known as the Motorola Page Entry (PET) as well as the IXO alphanumeric entry protocol until it was adopted by Telocator (now known as PCIA) as a standard in 1988. It was intended to be an industry standard for sending alphanumeric messages to pagers. They had consumer grade gear on the market as early as 1985. It used Bell 103 compatible modems and sent 7-bit data in ASCII at 300 baud. That may sound antiquated but SMS is 7-bit as well. How SMS beat out all contenders I can't begin to guess, but the showdown never happened. More here.

SMS was developed at the GSM cooperation starting in 1984 by Friedhelm Hillebrand and Bernard Ghillebaert. GSM was a project by France Télécom, and German Telecom. I don't want you to get the impression that they did the work, They were chairmen of those corporations. They more or less wrote the requirements document, which is like writing a want list for programmers. The fact that we know their names probably just means their publicists know how to use Wikipedia. They first  proposed the system at a GSM meeting in Oslo in 1985, but actual technical requirements didn't exist for years afterward no earlier than 1987, years after TAP. [EOM]

Hedy Lamarr Invented Wifi

The story is strange, and not particularly credible on the face of it.. but as it so happens, true. Sometimes unexpectedly someone we know for abilities in one arena works furtively in another. Proficiency in multiple disciplines was the foundation of being a Renaissance man, an idea sort of lost in our modern pre-fab world where most people don't know how to much of anything. but Hedy Lamarr comes from a different era entirely. She was and is famous as an actress of the 1930s and 40s. On the side she was an inventor and a surprisingly capable one.

Hedy Lamarr was born in 1913 as Hedwig Kiesler. She was raised in Vienna her father was a banker, her mother a pianist.Her father was said to have given her an interest in technology. She invented scores of inconsequential wonks: a cola-flavor tablet similar to Fizzies, an attachment to tissue boxes to hold used tissue, and then the  not-so-wonky  US Patent 2,292,387. More here and here.

Back in 1933, Ms. Lamarr was married to Fritz Mandal, the first of her six husbands. Mr. Mandal worked in the manufacture of military aircraft in Austria. Lamarr clearly learned a few things before they divorced in 1937. By 1940 she was married to Gene Markey, and met  George Antheil at a party. Antheil had previously experimented with automated control of musical instruments and was a successful composer. She bounced her latest idea off him, radio control for torpedoes that employed frequency hopping to avoid detection and jamming. After consulting with an electrical-engineering professor at the California Institute of Technology,they filed a patent for a "Secret Communication System", on June 10, 1941. Radio control was not new, Tesla had invented that more than to decades earlier. But frequency hopping, that was a completely new idea. 

Their system used a synchronized punched rolls of paper, like piano rolls to scan across a set of 88 frequencies. Note that there are 88 keys on a piano so the design stayed solidly within Antheil's experience automating player pianos. The Navy scoffed, but eventually tried out the idea in 1962 during a blockade of Cuba.It was a few decades late for her dreams of foiling the Nazis. Other groups were equally dismissive usually recommending she just go out and raise money for war bonds. It probably didn't help that she wasn't yet a naturalized citizen, but some of it was certainly sexism as well.

I've read the patent. It would probably even sort of work, but it's reliance on a Rube Goldberg mechanical timing would likely lose synch in a moving torpedo. But in the U.S. we patent not just devices but also ideas. Lamarr called her idea "frequency hopping" a term we still use today. It was the forerunner of the spread-spectrum technology used in Wi-Fi, CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) technology in cell phones, cordless phones and of course... certain secret communication systems. Antheil died in 1959 and never saw his work used, but Hedy certainly did. One can only hope she felt vindicated... even if the patents had expired.

Lamarr continued her film career and retreated from public life in the 1980s and retired in Miami Beach, FL. Clearly growing eccentric, she was arrested in 1991 for shoplifting laxatives. She died in January of 2000 at the age of 86.

The atmostphere is the antenna!

This may be a wild goose chase. Researchers at Samsung in Korea are now working on a way to turn the ionosphere into an antenna. A patent application filed by the company reveals plans to direct higher frequencies radio signals, at about 1 gigahertz, at the ionosphere, to alter its behavior. Is it possible? Maybe. In 2006 they filed a patent. It's inventor is listed as Sang-Hun Lee. The abstract reads as follows:

"Disclosed is a long distance communication system using the ionosphere. The long distance communication system includes an Earth station for modulating a signal having a modulation frequency onto a carrier frequency signal, which is absorbable in the ionosphere, and radiating a modulation frequency signal to a specific region of the ionosphere. The signal transmitted from the Earth station converts a DC current into an AC current in the ionosphere and the AC current re-radiates the modulation frequency signal to the Earth. "

It regards use of a portion of the ionosphere as an antenna. As a refresher please recall that the ionosphere is the layer of the atmosphere at an altitude of 50 kilometers. We already use thsi layer to bounce low frequency radio signals from one side of the world to the other. This is not what the patent is covering.

It describes a long-distance communications system using an Ultra High Frequency (UHF) radio signal with a carrier frequency below 2 GHz. This signal is to be transmitted from the Earth to the ionosphere which will accumulated energy. This will change electron temperature thus causing DC current to converted into the AC current. This AC current is to be modulated by controlling the change in electron temperature. This point of reflection could then operate as an antenna re-radiating the UHF signal back down to Earth.

I have come to think that this may be a bogus patent. The Serial number and the Application data all lead to one US patent # 6904080. It's abstract is as follows:

"A receiving circuit has a speech/no-speech signal detector for detecting whether there is a speech signal or not based on data inversely diffused by finger receivers, and a clock controller for controlling operation of the finger receivers based on a detected result from the speech/no-speech signal detector. If a speech signal is detected by the speech/no-speech signal detector, then the clock controller controls all the finger receivers to operate. If no speech signal is detected by the speech/no-speech signal detector, then the clock controller controls only one or two of the finger receivers to operate."

The details of that significantly different sounding patent regard CDMA which is completely different than all I described previously. Was it all a hoodwink? Maybe so.