CAPTAIN OF CDMA: Qualcomm cofounder Irwin M. Jacobs wins the 2013 IEEE Medal of Honor for his pioneering work in digital communications.

Before there was Qualcomm, there was Linkabit, and before that there was the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's Deep Space Network, where I was introduced (through Jacobs, Viterbi, Gilhousen, et.al.) to digital communication theory.

As a side note, CDMA (code division multiple access) is an outgrowth of direct-sequence spread spectrum, widely used by the military for 'stealth' communication systems.