Qualcomm's origin story carries all the hallmarks of classic American entrepreneurial mythology: seven engineers leaving a corporate job in 1985 to start a company out of a converted restaurant in San Diego, betting everything on a wireless technology that the U.S. Military had developed but the commercial world had yet to embrace. The founders — led by the visionary Irwin Jacobs and the coding theorist Andrew Viterbi, whose algorithm for decoding convolutional codes is taught in every electrical engineering program in the world — understood before almost anyone else that the future of communication was wireless and that the physics of Code Division Multiple Access gave it properties that existing analog and TDMA systems could not match. Founded in 1985 by Irwin Jacobs, Andrew Viterbi, and five colleagues who pioneered Code Division Multiple Access technology, Qualcomm built an intellectual property empire that underpins every major wireless communication standard from 3G through 5G. Founded in San Diego in 1985, Qualcomm has never operated a semiconductor fabrication facility. In 1968, Jacobs and Viterbi co-founded their first company, Linkabit, which developed digital communications systems and satellite broadcast encryption technology for the U.S. Defense Department and commercial satellite operators. The company they founded on July 7, 1985, was initially conceived as a telecommunications consulting and research firm. The founding team leased office space in a former Casa Gambino restaurant in San Diego — a detail that became part of the company's origin mythology — and began taking contract work from companies including Hughes Aircraft and the Department of Defense. Unlike TDMA (Time Division Multiple Access), which allocated different time slots to different users, CDMA could theoretically accommodate many more simultaneous users on the same spectrum allocation — a critical advantage as the cellular industry began to confront capacity constraints in the late 1980s.