This story is part of CNET at 25We're celebrating a quarter of a century of industrial technology and our role in telling you its story.
In a Washington Post article published November 3, 1990, author H. Jane Lehman predicted that the next decade would bring a new wave of home automation. She even used the term "smart home" decades before it spread. But she also said something was missing: "What the home automation community is waiting for is an industry standard that tells builders and remodelers how to wire homes for full automation."
Hooking up a smart home with wires, however, wouldn't be the standard the industry has been waiting for. Nobody knew at the time, but Lehman and everyone else were really waiting for Wi-Fi.
For more of that
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The smart home industry would not exist without Wi-Fi. And without reliable Wi-Fi, today's smart home wouldn't work. That's why Building a solid wireless setup is always the first thing CNET recommends when someone asks how to get started with smart home technology.
That's why I'm taking you back to the mid-1990s to celebrate CNET's 25th anniversary - and the invention of the late 90s that made the smart home possible: Wi-Fi.
Continue reading: These 8 products inspired the smart home revolution
But first, what is the smart home?
The smart home is a broad term that applies to pretty much any device that works with your device phone, TV or intelligent speaker. Despite the large variety of products in the category - from Sprinkler systems to Refrigerators and Security cameras - They all have a common goal: to simplify your daily life.
Physical stores and online retailers alike these days have curated "Smart Home" sections devoted to this seemingly incongruous mishmash of household appliances. And smart devices are popular - according to a 2018 survey by research company Traqline, 69% of US households say they own at least one.
The smart home as we know it now only started in the 2010sbut it was predicted much longer. A quick search for ads from the 1950s and 1960s reveals countless examples of this autonomous robots and other visions of the future that have now become reality. And during slow cooker, programmable thermostats and other "non-intelligent" devices may not be considered smart home devices by modern standards. They have helped us automate aspects of our lives for decades.
There were even early whole home automation systems attached to telephone lines.
However, Wi-Fi, the "industry standard" that would enable wireless connectivity and automation in entirely new ways, would not be introduced until 1997.
The way to WiFi
In her article in the Washington Post, Lehman also quoted a contractor named Leon Weiner who said the 1990s would be the "decade of home automation." Weiner had a couple of decades off, but he was definitely on something; Connectivity was already taking shape.
Although the The internet developed in the early 1970sIt was only introduced to the public when the "World Wide Web" was launched on August 6, 1991. You were online then Dial-up Internet over your home phone line. It took a long time and it was loud, but it worked. Something.
Around the same time, in the early 1970s, the Internet was developed, called a Wi-Fi forerunner AlohaNETwas used by the University of Hawaii at Honolulu to communicate with its facilities on various islands. Then in 1973 Bob Metcalfe invented the EthernetThis is a way for multiple computers to connect and communicate with each other. In 1974, Vic Hayes, known as the "Father of Wi-Fi", joined Agere Systems, then part of NCR Corporation. There he created many data communication standards and finally IEEE 802.11 - the standard on which Wi-Fi-enabled devices are based.
In 1985 the US Federal Communications Commission published the ISM band (Industrial, Scientific and Medical), a frequency band in the 2.4 GHz range.
Wi-Fi was officially introduced to the public in 1997. (Lots of other things happened in between too, but this is the abridged version that focused on key developments that brought the Internet closer to Wi-Fi in the 90s this CNET 25 items for a more detailed chronology of other technical innovations that dominated this decade.)
Wi-Fi and the smart home
The "industry standard" required by Lehman was finally here - and people were enthusiastic.
"We are on the verge of transformation. It is a moment reflecting the birth of the Internet in the mid-1970s when the radical pioneers of computer networks - machines that talk to each other! - hijacked the telephone system into their first digital hells," wrote Chris Anderson in a Wired article published in May 2003 on the creation of Wi-Fi.
"What makes the new standard so tempting?" Anderson continued. "Wi-Fi is cheap, powerful, and most of all, it works. A paperback-sized box that costs no more than dinner for two magically distributes broadband Internet across an area the size of a soccer field. One Card It doesn't get any bigger than a matchbox. The next laptop you buy will likely have WiFi built in. Cables may soon be used only for power supply.
That last sentence is key: "Wires could soon be just for power."
Can you imagine using a? intelligent speaker if we still had a dial-up or if you used a cable Broadband Connection instead of Wi-Fi? How would you deal with multiple smart speakers? Or just several smart devices in general? The number of cables and wires connecting them to broadband would make the smart home - especially the DIY smart home - extremely cumbersome.
By connecting smart home devices to the Internet and thus the cloud, Wi-Fi also enables access to advanced functions. Natural language processing for smart speakers, usage pattern algorithms to make your smart thermostat run more efficiently, and video image processing so your smart video doorbell can distinguish a person from a passing car all often take place on computers in the cloud that you would not be able to access without them Wi-Fi to bridge the gap from home to the bigger internet.
Without Wi-Fi, designers, engineers, and other product developers might not have even been able to come up with the smart home devices we use today, let alone enable the thousands of integrations among them. Of course there is other standards that allow connected devices, from ZigBee to Z-Wave - as well as proprietary protocols like Lutron's Clear Connect, but these hubs still need to connect to your WiFi router to allow communication between devices.
Wi-Fi is the bridge that holds everything together - and we thank the 90s for that.
Continue reading: The best WiFi routers of 2020