The foundation protocol for Wi-Fi that IEEE selected in 1993 was jokingly named after an airport.

Written By Greg Ennis

As the IEEE was nearing the end of its deliberations towards the selection of a foundation protocol for Wi-Fi, the chair of the Medium Access committee announced that his fondest wish was that the proponents of the various competing proposals would meet by chance in the Dallas Fort Worth airport and would figure out how to merge their ideas into a single winning submission. Although they didn’t actually meet at DFW, the three representatives of Xircom (Phil Belanger), Symbol (Greg Ennis), and NCR (Wim Diepstraten) indeed decided to work together on a combined proposal — which they jokingly named “DFWMAC”. Eventually they decided the acronym stood for “Distributed Foundation Wireless MAC”.

DFWMAC was selected by IEEE as the foundation protocol in November 1993, over competing proposals from IBM and others.

Read more about the history of Wi-Fi in Beyond Everywhere.

Greg Ennis
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