Home Digital Home

The technology is new, but the situation is not, Consider this... The electric light and the telephone didn't become common until well after they were invented. It's simply because nobody knew what to do with them. There wasn't anything to plug in and there wasn't anybody else with a phone to talk to. The technology existed, but the applications hadn't been invented yet.

It wasn't until the late seventies that coaxial cable began to appear in new homes. It wasn't needed until people started having cable TV in several rooms. Home technologies have advanced at a glacial pace for over eighty years. Hang on to your hats folks. A paradigm shift is taking place right now. It's a revolution, a transformation, a sort of metamorphosis. It does not just happen, but rather, is driven by agents of change.

Timekeeping has existed for centuries, but it had no urgent application, no real meaning for the masses until Watt and Stephenson invented the locomotive and, hence, the schedule.

The all-digital home network is here today......
and its proponents are doing their best not to make the mistakes of the past. The agents of change aren't quite so random this time. We've lived in an analog world for so long that making the paradigm shift in our lifestyles never occurred to us. Most people with mortgages and kids have survived the transition from the typewriter to the PC well enough. And many have even started integrating cell phones and PDA's into their daily lives.

Although these devices have made us more productive, have they really saved us any time? If anything, people work more frantically, in more places and with less leisure time than their parents did. But, the changes in lifestyle that these items have created have been subtle compared to the next step.

In the all-digital home/office everything communicates with everything else.
The only connection to many devices will be a single cable, or frequently no cables at all. A device in this environment may be added or removed at any time even while the system is operating. It announces its presence to the other components and establishes communication as soon as it is plugged in.

In addition, new specifications have been developed for wireless links between laptops, mobile phones and many other portable devices. The goal will be to allow devices to communicate as a network automatically and without being physically connected. There are some pretty cool applications for this.