Every decade of computing technology can be summarized fairly simply. (That's an Apple ad to the right.)

• The 1950s were the decade of the computer.
  
• The 1960s were the decade of the mini-computer.
  
• The 1970s were the decade of the PC.
  
• The 1980s were the decade of the network.
  
• The 1990s were the decade of the Internet.
  

The 2000s are the decade of wireless.

It's now clear that wireless technology defines this decade. Mobile phones are opening up Africa as never before. WiFi is making networking truly ubiquitous.

Walk or drive down any street, practically anywhere in the world, and you will find people obsessed by the use of wireless. Behaviors that in previous decades were shocking -- walking around chatting animatedly to the air for instance -- are now commonplace.

What's amazing, as we pass the halfway point, is how far this evolution has to go, and how easy it is to see where it can go:

• WiMax to link islands of WiFi, and to make true broadband mobile.
• Interlinks between cellular and WiFi networks.
• Devices that truly take advantage of wireless broadband.
• Applications that work automatically, with wireless as a platform.

Who do we have to thank for this?

While the fathers of previous technologies were around to enjoy the show (some, like Steve Jobs, were barely out of their teens), the Mother of this Decade passed away at its dawn.

That mother, of course, was Hedy Lamarr.

Hedy Lamarr created the technology behind digital cellular and WiFi in the early 1940s, along with the composer George Antheil. Their scheme was simple. To get radio messages past German intercept, simply change frequencies in time to music, found on any player piano roll. Since the German in the middle wouldn't know the tune, the message would get through -- he could neither hear nor jam it.

Lamarr and Antheil never made a dime from their discovery. That wasn't their intent. They were in the life-and-death struggle of World War II, alongside the inventors of radar, the computer, and the atomic bomb.

Their work was known around Hollywood and respected at the time. I don't think it's a coincidence that, while working with Antheil, Lamarr got her only roles where she played something resembling an intellectual, as Karen Vanmeer, Clark Gable's industry spy, in Boomtown, and as the woman Robert Young should have married in H.M. Pulham, Esq. (She also played the more intelligent of three dancers opposite Lana Turner and Judy Garland in Ziegfeld Girl.) After the work with Antheil was done, she never got another chance to show her intellectualism on-screen.

But you see, once you replaced the player piano roll with a computer chip, starting in the 1960s, specifically a digital signal processor, you could get Moore's Law improvements -- exponential improvements -- in data handling, and frequency efficiency. Since the first WiFi standard came out in 1998, speeds have jumped from 1 mbps to over 100 mbps, using the same frequencies, and with low power devices those frequencies can be shared, practically endlessly.

Antheil passed away in 1959, but Lamarr survived until 2000, long enough to be recognized as a beautiful mind. Girls in this century will study her as a scientist, not an ingenue.

The line was meant for Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca, but I think of Hedy (born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler) whenever I get on my cellular phone, or find myself in a WiFi hotspot.

Here's looking at you, kid.