Andrew Viterbi explains his success as just following one step after another.
"Most of what I did was a natural extension of what I did before,"
he says. "There were no eureka moments. I had the right background. At
the right time, I was at the right place."
His groundbreaking work in the cellular field, for example, grew out of the
work he did after graduation on "very advanced spread-spectrum systems
for satellite tracking at JPL," he says. The next step was to use spread-spectrum
technology for communications between truckers and their long-haul trucking
companies. Cell phones didn’t exist. The companies regularly needed to
reach their drivers and determine their location.
Once cell phones were developed, the next logical step was easy for him. "After
we used spread-spectrum technology for the trucking industry, it seemed natural
to apply the technology to cell phones," he says. "But that concept
wasn’t so easy for others to comprehend. Most U.S. cell-phone companies
were using a different technology."
It took three years for Viterbi and his colleagues to convince the industry
this technology could work better than others. "Finally in the mid-nineties
it was accepted," he says. One big reason for its acceptance was its adoption
in parts of highly populated Asia.