WaveLAN

[2] This led to the founding of the 802.11 Wireless LAN Working Committee which produced the original IEEE 802.11 standard, which eventually became the basis of the certification mark Wi-Fi.

The technology was also sold as WaveLAN under an OEM agreement by Epson, Hitachi, and NEC, and as the RoamAbout DS by DEC.[3] It competed directly with Aironet's non-802.11 ARLAN lineup,[4] which offered similar speeds, frequency ranges and hardware.

On June 17, 2002 Proxim acquired the IEEE 802.11 LAN equipment business including the trademark ORiNOCO from Agere Systems.

Proxim later renamed its entire 802.11 wireless networking lineup to ORiNOCO, including products based on Atheros chipsets.

[11] The WaveLAN IEEE ISA, MCA and PCMCIA cards used Medium Access Controller (MAC), HERMES, designed specifically for 802.11 protocol support.

There are shortcomings in WaveLAN & initial 802.11 compatible devices security strategy: This was addressed by the 802.11i Wi-Fi Protected Access (WPA) that replaced WEP in the standard.

This allows non-Windows OS' to utilize the near-universal nature of drivers written for the Windows platform to the benefit of other operating systems, such as Linux, FreeBSD, and ZETA.