so first, fun story about the sinclair zx81: the house I grew up in, had a rudimentary "home automation system", installed in the mid-1980s, driven by a zx81 - mounted sideways to a joist in the basement. Courtesy of the local electric power utility company at the time, LILCO (later LIPA).
growing up, the closest thing we had to a "computer" when my parents rented and moved into that house in 1992, was a word processor - one of those Smith-Corona PWP jobs, with an amber monochrome screen. we didn't have Commodores or Apples, and our Ataris were all 2600 or 5200. a "PC" was unheard of, really; why'd we need a business machine, let alone an international one? we don't do business, we're a suburban single-family home!
but in the basement, the business was being done for us.
this "computerized power control" system, was installed there: a Sinclair ZX81, the cheapest COTS computer you could buy wholesale at $50 a pop by then. it was fitted with a permanently fixed cartridge program card, a ribbon of wires presumably soldered to the expansion edge connector, a large circuit board in a wall-mounted metal cabinet box, like a home security system (not a typical PCB, but a phenolic kind of substrate with logic chips and many links), and it had a neat little overlay and mask on the membrane keyboard of the computer, to make it into a nifty control panel and prevent a non-technician from breaking out of program.
this menagerie controlled a series of relays/contactors, LED indicator lights, and was fed inputs from the push-button light switches (fancy!) and thermostats in the house, plus a "remote" module, which I think was a rudimentary radio modem. or at least, a "dem" - it only received, I believe.
it controlled the electric hot water, the central vacuum cleaner system, some of the lighting circuits, window air conditioner sockets, and the thermostats and heaters in the house - and the whole system was installed by LILCO/LIPA as an experimental feature in the mid-1980s.
the power company could tell this system about things like pre-load-shedding conditions or anticipated peak power times, and it could respond in like, by deprioritizing the water heater, turning off the A/C, or adding a delay to the heating thermostat. I think there was also a subscription service to allow you to dial in to the power company and control your lights and stuff over the phone. a real Technology Connections kind of dream system, in the 1980s, before the Game Boy.
but if the system needed servicing, there was a "service port" on the bottom, with an RF connector and audio jacks. our home boiler tech back then, had a Sony Watchman or some kind of portable TV set, and a Walkman, and tapes specifically for testing the system. he'd start by connecting the TV, now a monitor, and looking at the screen of information it provided. any obvious errors would show up here, in addition to an ERROR light above the panel - if that ever lights up, we gotta call 'em. he would then hook up the tape deck, hit a button on the keyboard, then press play on the walkman. he'd repeat this about two or three times, with different tapes, and press certain keys on the now-exposed keyboard when it told him to. he'd let me watch, because I was Very Computers at the age of six, and this was a computer in the house! the house was a computer! now, it couldn't have been cheap to call him down, but it was - as far as I know - sponsored by the power company.
the power company here were doing some real neat R&D before they fell over with the Shoreham Nuclear project, and in the end, got eaten up by a series of utility service contract divestments and acquisitions including Keyspan and the UK National Grid at some point, before ending up on PSE&G (the east coast's PG&E).
the Brookhaven National Lab lives here, a function of the Department of Energy. with that, we seemingly had a wide license in the '70s and '80s to experiment with the local power grid and oh boy did we.
for starters, LILCO and LIPA were in charge of the first test rollout of what we call "smart meters" today, in the '80s. they did a lot of R&D in that field as the Long Island Power Authority, and you may see that name on smart meters on your home, even far away from Long Island. they're still around, but mostly as a state-owned shell company for administrative and tax purposes, handling the grid economy and billing PSEG for the service they provide, who then sells it to us.
the NIMBYs fought smart meters, at first, because they were afraid of the power company getting hacked (the hacking scare in the '90s was all too common). eventually this devolved into the "5G death rays" fanaticism about banning and opting-out of smart meters that we know today.
we also had plans from LIPA for solar farms and wind farms in the fields of the closing Grumman and state psychiatric hospital properties, as well as offshore wind farms, but they by and large were NIMBYed into oblivion by the clueless people that live here, who genuinely believe wind generators are fans spinning at 10,000RPM, blowing the air off of the island and shredding seabirds into pulp. no, I've heard this from people first-hand. yes, people actually believe this, and are willing to join a petition sponsored by Big Oil to stop the wind farms.
also - the title image of this post - LIPA were also in charge (heh) of the world's first commercial-scale, grid-capacity in-production experiment with superconducting YBCO cables at Holbrook.
we were well on track to set up superconducting power distribution lines across all of Long Island, after the experiment at Holbrook.
and... it actually ran great! until, from the looks of it, someone fat-fingered one of the frig cycle controls; but the system recovered quickly from that without serious damage. (see: https://www.osti.gov/biblio/1046827 for the source document, and more information about this experiment)
then there's the Shoreham Nuclear Power Plant project.
there's about sixty nuclear plants in the US which have been completely built and decommissioned - maybe a dozen or so were shut down before they were even gridded and producing electricity.
I used to deliver mail to one of them.
the one on long island set in motion a lot of corruption and manipulation of like, greenpeace activists and stuff by the anti-nuclear/pro-fossil industries. it was really at the height of the 80s/90s anti-nuc sentiment, post-chernobyl, post-TMI. the chief editor at 2600 Magazine, known for their activism then and now, was against it too - and made a rather chilling radio-play, as an interspersed breaking news segment during an otherwise typical university radio music program, about what if the unthinkable were to happen in Shoreham. I heard that it was listened to by people in the county legislature at the time, and may have had an impact on the decision to shut the project down.
it was bad enough that the LILCO was summarily decomissioned and subsumed into LIPA. now, LIPA, which was established at first as the proposed operating company for the Shoreham nuclear plant, and the power distribution capacity for it to interface with the grid at large, suddenly had responsibility for the public power lines, poles and service infrastructure. eventually, the LIPA was also providing generation capacity, before they manifested that all into a contract and pushed all their customers onto the PSE&G monster, which had powered over, if not outright acquired, the various power companies in New Jersey, southern and downstate NY, and Pennsylvania, by this point, through sheer will of near-perpetual contracts and M&A.
there was even a peace bridge, a right-of-way called LILCO Way in Wading River, which was to serve as a temporary, high voltage DC interconnect between the incompatible and competing systems, and was to be built with high-temperature superconducting cable!
(It was to also connect to Brookhaven National Lab for their high-energy physics research.)
so, thinking about it, if the power plant had come to operation, and grid capacity multiplied as much as it did, before RHIC was built, chances are we'd have a superconducting supercollider in Long Island. we'd have discovered element 119, and the island of stability would've been named after Long Island for its apparent twin forks on the proton graph.
like, fuck. imagine, element 119, "Brookhavenine". Damn.
Whole lot of hell those suburban NIMBYs did to Long Island's place in science and industry.
