for its key wireless patent. The group voted repeatedly on which way to go forward and produced heaps of records, but CSIRO didn't even participate in the 802.11 committee. The group published the first 802.11 standard in 1997 and CSIRO came forward years after the fact.

The company hired US patent lawyers who told a very different story about innovation, ultimately a very lucrative tale in an East Texas courtroom. The narrative goes like this: CSIRO's idea of using "multicarrier modulation" to defeat the problem of indoor interference with radio waves was way ahead of its time. However, the "multicarrier" strategy was met with skepticism by a tech industry going in the wrong direction. They didn't even start to "get it" until a key, almost magical, date: January 23,1996. That's when the US Patent Office granted CSIRO US Patent Number 5,487,069. "After that things began to change, not rapidly right away, but they did change," said CSIRO's attorney at the time Dan Furniss, a well-respected San Francisco patent lawyer (Furniss died in 2010, surely a blow to CSIRO's new case).

The five CSIRO scientists named on the '069 patent changed the world, in Furniss' eyes. "CSIRO did not invent the concept of wireless LAN, it just invented the best way of doing it, the best way it's used now throughout the world," Furniss told the jury in 2009. CSIRO scientists had tirelessly tested hundreds of techniques until it found a "unique combination" that worked at high speeds.

That combination involved multicarrier modulation (also called OFDM) as well as