The universal handset

Time was when most radio sets had no software at all, and those that had any didn't do much with it. But Joseph Mitola III, an engineer working for a company called E-Systems (now part of Raytheon), envisioned something very different-a mostly digital radio that could be reconfigured in fundamental ways just by changing the code running on it. In a remarkably prescient article he wrote in 1992 for the IEEE National Telesystems Conference, he dubbed it software- defined radio (SDR).