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.

This was the rationale for the September 1988 purchase of MSI Data Corporation, a mobile computer company headquartered in southern California, for $120 million.

[2] The mobile computers being manufactured at the time relied on static memory (in this case SRAM) for execution space and general storage.

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.

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.

The ratification of IEEE 802.11b was a huge blow to the Symbol team which now had to reconfigure and engineer a direct sequence radio system.

Later on Symbol started to sell the radios as PC Cards as a stand-alone product to various original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and private label customers.

In 2002, Tomo Razmilovic, who succeeded Swartz as CEO in 2000, abruptly retired in the midst of a Securities and Exchange Commission inquiry into Symbol's accounting practices.

Following this revelation, Symbol cooperated fully with the SEC investigation, as well as with a separate federal criminal probe by the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York.

[9] On June 3, 2004, Razmilovic and seven other former Symbol executives were indicted on charges that they orchestrated a wide-ranging scheme to inflate the company's sales and profits.

It included several types of fraud, such as channel stuffing (booking sales to wholesalers and distributors as final sales to customers), candy deals (selling products to distributors with no matching customer orders and then buying the products back), use of tango sheets (records of how much revenues had to be inflated to match quarterly targets) and use of cookie jar reserves (declaring nonrecurring expenses that far exceeded likely expenses).