Apps for Your Appliances: The Continuing Vision of Home Automation

Posted by Michael Pinto on Jun 17, 2010 in Tech

This interesting panel discussion talks about the idea of consumer electronic appliances being able to connect to the cloud. What I found interesting about this discussion is that this idea isn’t 100% new, but in fact is the latest chapter in the ongoing evolution of an idea of a “smart house” which has been an old dream of the computer industry. A good example of this was the AT&T commercials from 1993 which had the theme “You Will” — take a look at the commercial at the one minute mark where your voice opens up doors: Read more…

Tags: 1993, Apps

Intel Ships the Pentium: Sixteen Years Ago Today

Posted by Michael Pinto on Mar 22, 2009 in Tech

On this day in 1993 Intel introduced the first set of Pentium chips which ran at 60 MHz. While that hardly sounds impressive today, back in the day this was a critical breakthrough for the first PCs that would support multimedia. Looking back at it Windows 3.1 seems primitive, but this was the first generation of PCs that started to feel more Mac like — the improved ease-of-use opened the doors of computing to a generation of users who were put off my the MS-DOS text interface that dominated screens until that point in time. Read more…

Tags: 1993, Intel