The other day I was philosophizing over the name Wi-Fi. It is a play on Hi-Fi in the sense that Wi-Fi gives you high bandwidth, good quality wireless in the same way that Hi-Fi once gave us good sound.
But they are also similar in another way: In the early 1970s, Hi-Fi was a hobbyist movement, a matter of attitude, a way to show that you actually cared about sound quality. Hi-Fi could not be taken for granted. There was a name for it, because the normal state was worse. People still listened to music on jukeboxes, where chrome and neon lights were more important than high fidelity playback, and on AM car radios. Early Hi-Fi hobbyists built their own equipment from kits, and many of them went on to build home computers, using the same form factor with a flat box containing a big, horizontal printed circuit board with connectors on the rear and knobs and switches on the front. This is the same design we recognize from the first IBM PC. I'm too young to remember these details, and I never built any of these myself. Who can fill in? Did the Hi-Fi movement actually kill the jukebox? What happened to the pay-per-tune business model? In those days, RIAA was a pickup filter, not a legal threat. -- Lars Aronsson ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Aronsson Datateknik Teknikringen 1e, SE-583 30 Linuxk�ping, Sweden tel +46-70-7891609 http://aronsson.se/ http://elektrosmog.nu/ http://susning.nu/ -- general wireless list, a bawug thing <http://www.bawug.org/> [un]subscribe: http://lists.bawug.org/mailman/listinfo/wireless
