The PhotoLink II protocol developed by Stan Fickes, Tom Kurata, and myself in 1991 for Photonic Corp. in Los Gatos was much of the basis of the IEEE 802.11 MAC protocol, the standard used by all WiFi LANs. The key elements of our protocol — acknowledgements, fragmentation, encapsulation, hidden-node protection, and either centralized or distributed operation — are in the standard.
Greg Ennis, an old buddy from the IEEE 802.3 low-cost LAN wars of the 80s and technical director of the WiFi Alliance, tells me that the standard was based on something called DFWMAC that he, Phil Belanger, and Wim Diepstraten devised in 1993. (The name is an inside joke, from a side comment the committee chair made about wishing the principals would meet some place like the DFW airport and resolve their differences.) There was considerable interchange between the DFWMAC guys and we at Photonics; we gave Greg our protocol specs.
The backgrounds of all these folks were pretty similar as well: Phil was known as “Mr. Omninet” back then, because he was the champion of the Corvus LAN that was the first real commercial success in the field of twisted-pair LANs. Photonics’ hardware engineering director was a co-worker of Phil’s at Corvus. Wim was with NCR’s networks division in Holland, people that I had worked with closely in the development of the 802.3 StarLAN standard (NCR Holland eventually became AT&T, then Lucent, then Agere, and is now Proxim).
Greg was the 802.3 task force chair for PC Network while the StarLAN activity was going on, and later a consultant to Tandem, the company I worked for during the StarLAN standards development. His marketing director at Sytek, the PC Network company, was at Xircom when they developed their wireless product.
Any group of bright people with the appropriate background would have developed a protocol similar to DFWMAC at that time. Virtually all the protocol’s underpinnings can be found in Ethernet, AppleTalk, ARCNet, Omninet, Token Ring, and StarLAN provided you keep the relevant bits and toss the rest. Greg, Phil, and Wim combined the best ideas available at the time and had the persistence to get it through the committee, no mean feat in itself.