In case you nerds are unaware, Professor Norman Abramson helped pioneer some of the first wireless networks using radio waves way nack in 1971.
At UH Mānoa, Abramson teamed up with faculty member Franklin Kuo, with assistance from other faculty members and graduate students, to develop ALOHAnet, the basis of all wireless communications today—including mobile, satellite, cellular and "Wireless Fidelity"/WiFi. Debuted in 1971, ALOHAnet was the first system to transmit data between computers using radio waves. The novel approaches developed led to the development of Ethernet and wireless communication technologies used to this day.
ALOHAnet was designed to wirelessly transmit messages and data between researchers amongst Hawaii's many far flung islands and was a smaller scale contemporary to the far better known ARPANET, a precursor to the Internet which used landlines.
ALOHAnet was funded by the US military through DARPA much like ARPANET was and according to Marc Weber, an internet historian at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, Calif. "Every modern form of wireless data networking, from WiFi to your cellphone, goes back to the ALOHAnet."
He passed away at the age of 88 due to complications from skin cancer.