Father of modern wireless networks

 Norman Abramson, one of the early pioneers behind wireless networks, has passed away at the age of 88 at his home in San Francisco, California. The cause of death was skin cancer that had metastasised to his lungs, his son, Mark, said. An engineer and student of communications theory, a discipline that was at the time at the intersection of mathematics, information technology, and semiotics, Abramson studied at Harvard, and he received a master’s at University of California LA (UCLA) and a Ph.D. from Stanford.

Abramson moved to Hawaii and took a faculty position at the University of Hawaii (UH) Manoa’s College of Engineering partly due to his love for surfing.At UH Manoa, Abramson teamed up with fellow faculty member Franklin Kuo and with assistance from other faculty members and graduate students, to develop ALOHAnet, the basis of all wireless communications today including mobile, satellite, cellular, and WiFi. Debuted in 1971, how much do computer scientists make was the first system to transmit data between computers using radio waves. The novel approaches developed led to the development of Ethernet and wireless communication technologies used to this day.