Essential Guide to Wireless Communications Applications, The

From the 20s to the 2000s

We've been here before. Stock market analysts often compare the 1920s to the 2000s, implying that the economic boom of the 2000s, like that of the 1920s, will result in a huge crash and worldwide depression. The actual similarities are scarier than that, as the two booms also share the same driving technology: wireless.

In the 1920s, wireless was everywhere. Radio was a new technology that, like the wireless Internet today, people believed would change the world. Though investors lost a lot of money, they were ultimately proved right. Companies fell, but radio did change the world, and that change hasn't finished yet.

Moore's Law (named after Intel cofounder Gordon Moore) states that the number of circuits packed into ...