Introduction

["colin7598" <colinblake@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi, I have been watching this group for about a month now.

My main reason for joining was to see what progress had been made in
the HA market.

In 1988, I started automating my own home, electric curtain tracks,
distributed HiFi, centeral heating/hot water, lights on-off-dimmer
and motorised up-down control.

The real automation came about when I designed the telephone
controller. This allow me to call into my home and find the status of
each appliances and then control they remotely. The telephone
interface was 'Human speech' stored in EProm, which gave prompts and
stutus messages. The control was via DTMF tones generated by the
telephone. So I communicated in a form the electronics understood and
it 'spoke' back to me in 'true' speech (uncompressed at the time, it
used 1M EProms for 1 minute of speech).

In 1989 I started a company called "Phone Control Services",
which
designed and built the telephone controller. Soon I had contracts
with clients who anted 'their' own products enhanced. But never
wanted to interface with other products.
I ran the company for 4 years then sold it.

I have since got into video transmission systems, over POTS ISDN IP
MOBILE and run a consultancy company advising on TeleVideo.

In my opinion the HA market has not moved much in the last 17 years,
it is still a niche market. ...... or am I wrong?

Colin