Bob O’Hara
I’m retired. That means I am so busy now I don’t know how I ever had time for a full time job. I retired from Cisco, who had acquired the company I started with three colleagues. That company was Airespace. Airespace was a venture-funded startup, funded by Storm Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, and Battery Ventures. We invented the centralized controller architecture for 802.11 wireless LANs, making it much easier to deploy, manage, and operate large wireless LANs, like those found in big companies, schools, and universities.
Prior to founding Airespace, I ran my own independent consulting business, aiding client companies to define and implement strategies to standardize local area networking technologies. I contributed significantly to both the Wi-Fi (IEEE 802.11) and power line networking standards during this period. My introduction to Wi-Fi technology occurred while I was employed by AMD, where I contributed to the development of the first commercial chipset for the Wi-Fi standard. Also while at AMD, I was a field application engineer, working each day with our customers, often in their development labs, helping them to apply AMD’s chips in their products and solve the problems they encountered during their product developments.
Before AMD, I spent several years as an engineer at Fairchild Space and Electronics and at TRW Defense and Space Systems Group. At Fairchild, I developed military avionic systems. At TRW, I was involved in the development of systems that Tom Clancy wrote about in The Hunt for Red October.
But, the part that may be of most interest is the five years I was a member of the Bowie (Maryland) High School Starliners Jazz Band. The Starliners was a 25-piece jazz band, run as an extracurricular activity by volunteer director Col. Joseph Carley (USAF, Ret.). The band played dance gigs 4-6 times a month, to provide the income for uniforms, music, and transportation to jazz festivals. I was a reed man (alto sax, clarinet, and flute). My passion for jazz began in this band. I started playing in the Starliners when I was only 13, a few years before even getting into the high school. Only when I finally realized how difficult it would be to earn a living as a musician did I finally select electrical engineering as my major in college and my career.
