There was little evidence of information technology invading the suburban idyll of the Daily Mail Ideal Home Exhibition at the press preview last Friday, presumably because information technology has yet to make the impact on people’s lives that some would claim it has. At Ferranti Creditphone Ltd’s stand, hidden away between the home gyms, spas and other leisure paraphernalia, a demonstration was going on of its Zonephone telepoint offering: Ferranti reckons all the delays are well behind it, and says around 1,500 base stations at 1,000 sites are up and running – partly a result, claimed a spokesman, of British Telecom getting its act together and giving priority to the provision of lines at these sites. Unusually for these events, technical questions were not met with mute bewilderment: within the handsets themselves, we learnt, the Texas Instruments chips originally intended to process the intelligent features of the phones have now been replaced by Hitachi 64180s, and a dual version of the CRM radio module that handles the radio link to the base stations is planned for September – this will enable the handsets to support the Common Air Interface standard. At the management end of the network, billing is to be handled by DEC VAXclusters, with an Oracle relational database using software written by Logica. The handsets are available now for UKP200, with enrolment on to the service and annual subscription costing a total of UKP172. Meanwhile, Keyline Shopping Ltd, set up in 1987 by Chris Curry, Acorn Computers co-founder, was downstairs demonstrating its computerised home shopping service, based on software from the Computer Management Group. The Keyline Home Service connects consumers to a variety of service providers in the retail, financial, and insurance sectors via an X25 link connected to a local node. The customer is provided with a battery-operated lap-top terminal into which instructions and questions can be entered in a natural C-based language: these are then processed by the lap-top’s SGS-Thomson ST9 chip, and sent via a resident V22 modem to the X25 link at the cost of a local call. The service-provider receives and responds to these messages on a Stratus fault-tolerant computer loaded with software licenced from Computer Management at a cost of around UKP50,000. The cost of the X25 link is borne by the service-provider, who also pays a percentage of the transaction value to Keyline Shopping. Customers will pay around UKP50 for the terminal and connection to the service when it is available in autumn of this year; at that price, it is likely to have mass appeal among consumers attracted by the convenience of home shopping, but for the service really to take off, it will need to find more service-providers willing to participate in the venture. Up until now, Keyline hasn’t done too badly at all: the number of organisations currently committed to Keyline totals 18, including names such as Gateway, National Westminster Bank, Ladbrooke, British Telecom Directory Enquiries and Sun Alliance. Moving on, the search for other examples of computerisation in the home proved, alas, to be fruitless. An entry in the official guide for the Home Master HP 9000 sent several computer journalists on a wild goose chase for a Hewlett-Packard minicomputer-based home automation system, but to their dismay, the Home Master HP 9000 turned out to be an amazing spot and stain remover. Luckily, consolation was at hand in the form of the welcoming Jack Daniel’s stand. The Ideal Home exhibition at Earls Court, London is organised by Angex Ltd and opened on Saturday. It runs from 10am to 8pm daily seven days a week from now until April 1.
