Re: No more X10 at Radio Shack?

["Robert Green" <ROBERT_GREEN1963@xxxxxxxxx>]

"Bill Kearney" <wkearney99@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message news:bL-

<stuff snipped>

> I've been a developer for quite a while so I'm more than familiar
> with how X10 works.

Then you'll know this is the age-old legacy system debate aka the "grumpy
old man" syndrome.  "We *like* it like that!"  Somewhere in the bowels of
some naval station, for, airbase or national guard HQ is an application
still running on one of the million Zenith 8088 DOS PC's the government
bought back in the 80's.  I've seen it happen.  As everyone else phases in
new machines, it creates a vast supply of spare parts for ancient PC's and
there's always someone, somewhere, for some reason, be it an oddball ISA
board or some other unique peripheral, that's keeping an old PC on life
support.

I have a friend who's got an old ATT two line Compuphone hooked up to a
Gateway 286 running WIN31 AND having to remap dates since the software
crapped out WAY before the millenium, datewise.  But he loves that phone
because it logs all his calls, in and out and has lots of nice features for
speed dialing (and reprogramming sets of keys from the PC, not the phone
keyboard) and has a sound quality unmatched by most modern phones for both
handset and speakerphone.

I find it interesting because although brand new technologies have arrived
in HA, none have succeeded as well as something like the CD did in
completely revising the baseline of the industry.  Here in HA, it's the
simple, cheap yet powerful, nearly invisible, almost universal protocol that
will probably win.  (-:  I always expected it to be Zigbee, and never
expected it to be X-10.  I'm just surprised and happy that X-10's lasted
this long.

--
Bobby G.