Ahwatukee, House of the Future.
In the late 1970′s, when I was a kid, I went to see the very first house I had ever seen run by a personal computer. It was Ahwatukee, House of the Future. I believe the computer was an 8086 or 8088 (ed. see MicroMan’s post below) that cost more than $10,000 at the time. It ran the lights,the security system, the pool, etc. It was frackin amazing. It used infrared sensors so that when you entered a room the lights came on and turned off when you left. It had a video surveillance system that most would still find cutting edge. The door lock had no key and used a touch keypad to open. Designed by the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation, Charles R. Schiffner was the architect, it had the distinct style that was Frank Loyd Wright. The living room was this amazing vaulted space that I loved the second I saw it. The windows helped in the design of the air conditioning system that used dry ice; I recall someone saying that it was experimental and that it didn’t work out in the long run. It also had some solar cells and used solar to heat water. Now this all might seem trivial today but then it was magic. That was about the time when Logan’s Run , Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Battlestar Galactica, Star Trek -The Movie and Star Wars all came out. The future was just around the corner…
Wired’s House of the Future in the Bay Area.
Posted in High Tech, Pearls of Wisdom
January 23rd, 2010 at 1:35 pm
Good memory but slightly flawed. You could get rolled in the parking lot for saying the 8086 ran this house. It was a project of Motorola in town and used a number of 6809 microprocessors and similar microcontrollers to automate the house as you indicated. Wall and window panels moved based on the inside and desired temperatures and anticipated outside temperature change, a “home computer” would feed up recipe’s in the kitchen and many other advanced concepts integrated into the house. I worked with the guys working on it though never laid foot in it myself. Today, 30 years later, people are still acting like all these things are new ideas – and that they require monster computing power to implement, but Ahwatukee house was built to demonstrate that it was all possible, even back then. Intel makes the 8086 architecture and Motorola (now Freescale) was a stiff competitor of theirs building processors like the 6809 and 68000, remnants of which still exist in the “embedded” world.
January 26th, 2010 at 10:45 am
Thanks for clearing that up MicroMan, I appreciate it.
August 30th, 2011 at 9:34 pm
It was a great experience working there and a with Great staff ! Thanks for the Memories!