At about the same time, the IEEE decided to adopt the direct sequence approach in its IEEE 802.11b standard. Ultimately and not decisively, Kroger chose Telxon.
Kroger ordered a head-to-head comparison test. 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.
IEEE 802.11 was not yet ratified, so Symbol and Telxon were free to define competing standards of communication at this frequency band. Symbol Technologies and Telxon were operating radio networks in the 2.4 GHz ISM bands. Most notably, these two companies serviced major retailers such as Wal-Mart, Kroger, Safeway, Federated and others.Ī notable turning point occurred in 1994 with a competition for business at Kroger. The enterprise mobility management market was dominated by Symbol Technologies and Telxon, Inc. A thin client architecture was adopted in conjunction with a spread spectrum radio network. 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. The mobile computers being manufactured at the time relied on static memory (in this case SRAM) for execution space and general storage. This was the rationale for the September 1988 purchase of MSI Data Corporation, a mobile computer company that was headquartered in southern California, for $120 million. 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. These activities typically required people to scan items where they are stored and as such needed to be mobile. The company focused heavily on the retail industry and began to get involved in inventory management.
Under Swartz, the company marketed handheld laser bar code scanning devices. At that time, the company focused on handheld laser based scanning of bar codes. The company was co-founded in 1973 by Jerome Swartz and physicist Shelley A. 1.2 Accounting fraud and acquisition by Motorola.