Symbol Technologies

Symbol Technologies Inc.

Type	Subsidiary of Zebra Technologies
Industry	AIDC
Founded	1975
Founder	Jerome Swartz Shelley A. Harrison
Headquarters	Holtsville, New York, United States
Products	Barcode readers, wireless networking, mobile computers, RFID
Number of employees	5400
Parent	Zebra Technologies
Website	www.symbol.com

Symbol Technologies is an American manufacturer and worldwide supplier of mobile data capture and delivery equipment. The company specializes in barcode scanners, mobile computers, RFID systems and Wireless LAN infrastructure. Symbol Technologies is a wholly owned subsidiary of Zebra Technologies, and is headquartered in Holtsville, New York, on Long Island.

The company was co-founded in 1973 by Jerome Swartz and physicist Shelley A. Harrison. At that time, the company focused on handheld laser based scanning of bar codes. Under Swartz's leadership the company became a leader in handheld laser bar code scanning devices. The company focused heavily on the retail industry and began to get involved in inventory management. These activities typically required people to scan items where they are stored and as such needed to be mobile. 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 purchase of MSI - a mobile computer company that was headquartered in southern California.

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. A thin client architecture was adopted in conjunction with a spread spectrum radio network.

The Enterprise Mobility Management market was dominated by Symbol Technologies and Telxon, Inc. Most notably, these two companies serviced major retailers such as Wal-Mart, Kroger, Safeway, Federated and others.

A notable turning point occurred in 1994 with a competition for business at Kroger. Symbol Technologies and Telxon were operating radio networks in the 2.4 GHz ISM bands. IEEE 802.11 was not yet ratified, so Symbol and Telxon were free to define competing standards of communication at this frequency band. 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. Kroger ordered a head-to-head comparison test. Ultimately and not decisively, Kroger chose Telxon. At about the same time, the IEEE decided to adopt the direct sequence approach in its IEEE 802.11b standard.