Re: Mini-ITX PC's a the future of HA (was Re: X-10 Mister House Motion sensor problems)

[Marc F Hult <MFHult@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Overheard at the Constitution Convention of 1787: "Hey! I have a new idea.
Let's throw a tea party in Boston".

Here is the beginning of a synopsis of the discussion and the history of PCs
in Home Automation that would be useful for a wiki/FAQ entry.

I'd be pleased to host a 'protected' but publicly readable wiki using (eg)
http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki if others commit to participating.

The site would ad-free, non-commercial, not-for-profit. Manufacturers and
developers would be encouraged to provide accurate entries about their
products which would be reviewed objectively. From time to time, entries
might be migrated/spawned to a/the 'public' wiki.

I could provide installed application and space on a server and appropriate
admin rights (ACLs) to editors, participants and visitors.  A backup/mirror
would be maintained elsewhere by one or more editors in case I stroke or
fink out.

There would need to be at least one person other than me from
comp.home.automation that would be willing to act as the principal
editors/maintainers/moderator.

++++++++++++++++++++++++++

PC's in Home Automation Part I

Personal computers (PC's) have been a center of attention in the evolution
of Home Automation (HA) since the days of the Altair and Apple II. The Apple
II bus made analog and digital In-Out (I/O) connected to computing and data
storage capabilities available at affordable cost to academics building
one-off scientific instrumentation and home Do-It-Yourself (DIY) folks among
others.

After Apple abandoned its hardware expansion bus, the IBM-PC, which was
introduced in 1981, and its successors (PC-XT and PC-AT) became the
moderate-cost hardware platform of choice for digital and analog I/O.

Plug-in cards using IBM's  8-bit open-specification, Industry Standard
Architecture (ISA) expansion bus proliferated. The initial selection by IBM
of a variant of the 8086 family (internally 16-bit) with an  8-bit external
bus (8088 Central Processor) over a 16-bit  external architecture  was made
in part because of the maturity of integrated circuits (IC's) for the 8-bit
Zilog Z-80 processor on which PCs using the then-standard CPM operating
system (OS) were based.

The 8-bit ISA bus (mapped by IBM in an "I/O" address space separate from
memory addresses) was a feature of nearly all IBM-compatible computers from
the original IBM-PC in 1981 through those based on the Intel Pentium III and
Celeron and AMD CPUs two decades later. A notable exception was the IBM
Personal System/2 (IBM-PS/2) released in 1987 which failed to thrive
commercially in part because it used a proprietary expansion bus rather than
the ISA bus. With the introduction of IBM-AT in 198x, IBM introduced a
16-bit, memory mapped ISA bus that was backward compatible with the 16-bit
I/O and memory-mapped ISA bus.

---
PCI bus
etc
--
Other PC's
	Apple
	Timex Sinclair
	Atari
	etc
--
OS's
	Unix
	CPM
	OS2
	Linux
	BEOS
	PC-DOS
	Windows
	Apple
	etc
--
HA applications
	CyberHouse
	Invensys
	Mr House
	Charmed Quark
	Homeseer
	etc


etc, etc

++++++++++++++++++

Hope This Helps ... Marc

Marc_F_Hult
www.ECOntrol.org