The bluetooth named after Harald I Bluetooth, the
10th-century Danish king who unified Denmark and Norway, is a technological
innovation used to allow short-range wireless communication between electronic
devices. Bluetooth was developed in the late 1990s and soon achieved massive
popularity in consumer devices.
In 1998 Ericsson, the Swedish manufacturer of mobile
telephones, assembled a union of computer and electronics companies to bring to
the consumer market a technology they had been developing for several years
that was aimed at freeing computers, mobile phones, personal digital assistants
(PDAs), and other devices from the wires required to transfer data between
them. Because the protocol would operate on radio frequencies, rather than the
infrared spectrum used by traditional remote controls, such devices would not
have to maintain a line of sight to communicate.
Bluetooth, was designed to enable a wide variety of devices
to work together and the range of the network can be between 30 to 100 ft. Its
other key features were low power usage—enabling simple battery operation—and
relatively low cost.
