This is a second post in a series about Wi-Fi dinosaurs that are now mostly extinct. As mentioned in the original Wi-Fi Nostalgia blog, I have been cleaning out my office and purging myself of equipment from the Wi-Fi horse-and-buggy days.
The focus of this blog will be antique 802.11 client devices.
In the early days of enterprise 802.11 deployments, the majority of devices connecting to an enterprise WLAN were laptops used by employees. Laptops did not have embedded wireless network interface cards (NICs) and instead the WLAN form factor was PCMCIA radios. Many vendors manufactured 802.11 PCMCIA cards, but the two vendor radios that I used the most were either Lucent/Agere or Cisco.
As shown in the image below, Lucent had a series of bronze, silver and gold WLAN PCMCIA cards using the WaveLAN chipset. The most common brand name of these cards was ORiNOCO, however, these radios were rebranded under many different names.
The legacy Bronze was an 802.11 DSSS radio. The ORiNOCO Silver was an 802.11b radio but it only supported 64-bit WEP encryption. The infamous ORiNOCO Gold card was also an 802.11b radio that brought us the ultra-secure 128-bit WEP. Some of you might also remember that a firmware upgrade of an ORiNOCO Silver card could magically turn it into an ORiNOCO Gold card. I’m joking about ultra-secure, because it was not long before WEP cracking tools were freely available.
One of the main reasons that the ORiNOCO 802.11 radios were so popular was the fact that they had an external antenna connector.
Check out the image below to see how the ORiNOCO PCMCIA cards could be connected to a pigtail connector, which was then connected to either an omnidirectional or unidirectional external antenna. There was not a more perfect 802.11 radio for Wardriving and other outdoor WLAN activities. From 2000 to 2005, most of the WLAN penetration or “hacking” utilities were written around the chipset found in the ORiNOCO Gold card.
Cisco also made some quality PCMCIA 802.11 cards and they were used extensively in enterprise deployments together with Cisco autonomous APs. As shown in the image below, PCMCIA adapters with both internal and external antennas were available. 802.11g 802.11 PCMCIA radios for laptops were also very prevalent, but eventually laptop manufacturers moved towards embedded 802.11 radios.
Although the PCMCIA radios were the most widely used, many other 802.11 radio form factors existed including Compact Flash (CF), Secure Digital (SD), ExpressCard and Universal Serial Bus (USB) radios. As shown below, wireless PCI adapters could also be used to give a desktop computer wireless connectivity.
What about mobile devices?
In the early days of 802.11 technology the only mobile devices were wireless barcode scanners and eventually Voice over Wi-Fi (VoWiFi) phones. Tablet PCs and smart phones had yet to debut. However, my first mobile device was a personal digital assistant (PDA).
Check out my photo below when I used an 802.11b Symbol compact flash radio with my PocketPC and I even had a CF to PCMCIA adapter so that I could use my ORiNOCO Gold card with my PDA. How cool is that?
Alas, in today’s wacky world of Wi-Fi almost all 802.11 radios are embedded in the laptop or mobile device. 802.11 USB radios are still often used together with WLAN design and troubleshooting tools, but embedded radios are the norm.
So exactly how did someone actually configure these client devices? As mentioned previously, older laptops required a PCMCIA radio. These radios could be configured in Windows XP using the Wireless Zero Configuration (WZC) found in the Windows operating system. But to be brutally honest, the WZC really sucked. Most people choose to disable the WZC and instead use the WLAN vendor’s software client utilities. This image depicts both the ORiNOCO and Cisco software client utilities.
As 802.1X/EAP security became more widespread, I used to recommend Funk Software’s third-party software client utility. In the image below, the Odyssey Client supported multiple flavors of EAP protocols and could be used with just about any Wi-Fi radio.
Over the years, the client utilities in Windows, MacOS, iOS, Android and other operating systems have vastly improved and overlay supplicants are not used very often. Over the last 16+ years a lot has changed in regard to 802.11 client radios. Mobile devices have now far exceeded the number of laptops that connect to enterprise WLANs. As we move forward into the era of Internet of Things (IoT), wherever 802.11 radios might turn up next is open to endless possibilities.
Stayed tuned for my next blog in this series, Wi-Fi Nostalgia, Part 3 – Autonomous APs. In the meantime, if you have any legacy Wi-Fi tales that you would like to share please leave a comment or send us your pictures of fossilized Wi-Fi gear.