Back in the 1990s IBM had a pretty sizeable presence in the PC market, including its rather spiffy Aptiva series of PCs. Naturally their PCs had to feature heavily in another consumer-related thing that was popular in the 1990s, being smart home automation in the form of IBM Home Director. Recently [Ionic1k] took a look at this blast from the past, starting with one of the original IBM commercials.
At its core it used the same X10 protocol that similar solutions from RadioShack and others used, with many modules and packages you could get to use with it. You could also get a more bespoke installation performed at your home to move beyond mere X10, which some people are still finding when they’re buying a house.
Since this uses powerline communication, it required no wires to be run, just the requisite modules to be plugged into a power outlet, with the video demonstrating the basic setup and installation. The PC itself is plugged into the control module via the serial port, from which the Home Director control software can be used to create a configuration and control the state of connected modules.
Although X10 has the same issues as any kind of powerline communication, overall it seems like a very nice system, with a wide range of modules and absolutely easy to set up even for a casual Windows user.
Lots of Duke Nukem 3D levels were made with my Aptiva Pentium 166MHz. I only miss Duke Nukem 3D however.
You can still play.
It’s on Steam, it’s on sale and it’s Steam Deck (so also Linux) verified.
The IBM Home Director looks identical to the X10 PC software. Had a similar setup to control some lights and one relay controlled large resistor under my thermostat to preform auto setback at night to save a few $. The YTber stated the PC needs to be running, but both the IBM and X10 versions supported a serial linked controller with a battery backed clock to download and run the PC automations.
Hi, I remember the X10 from LGR’s channel.
It’s basically the 1980s counterpart, isn’t it? 🙂
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pm33KB2Th9M
They’re both X10 systems, Home Director is just branding.
The resistor under the thermostat is the definition of ingenious!
It’s nae Scottish. Draw your own conclusions.
It’s crap!
It’s disappointing just how much work it is in 2026 to get the same kind of local control we had back in the 90s with X10. Just about every smart plug, bulb, outlet, switch, etc wants to use its company’s cloud server and only their cloud server. When they decide to shut it down, you’re left with e-waste.
Zigbee, ZWave, and Matter don’t have that problem.
Nonsense! They are just marketed that way.
@chango mentioned Zigbee, Zwave and Matter. I don’t know anything about Matter but I have used Zigbee devices quite a bit. Zigbee2mqtt is your open-source controller for Zigbee devices, just add a usb dongle. It then talks to MQTT which is a really easy to interface with other software or even write your own. The common thing to do is to install HomeAssistant, again.. a free, open source product that talks to all your Zigbee stuff via MQTT and Zigbee2mqtt. There is a similar ZWave2mqtt which I haven’t tried but from what I read it does the same for all your ZWave products.
Anyway.. I have bought a lot of Zigbee products that recommend their branded, commercial controllers but work just fine with this open system.
Then there is X10… I remember seeing X10 products in catalogs as a kid and wanting them. So.. this reminded me of them, made me curious. Sure enough there are solutions for that. You can still buy X10 modules and you can connect them to MQTT and HomeAssistant.
And you mentioned cloud… I run HomeAssistant locally. It’s ui is an unencrypted webpage accessible via LAN. You can chose to pay for a cloud service to access that remotely. But.. nah! I then have apache, with SSL acting as a proxy to that. And… it has a nice Android app. (Probably iPhone too but come on… iOS? On HaD? Too closed!)
So.. how is this not the best of times ‘so-far’ regarding this stuff? Would you really rather IBM’s local-only proprietary application running on an old crashy Windows 98 box?
Also.. if you are concerned about generating e-waste what are you doing buying so-called “smart bulbs”? With those, every time your light bulb burns out you are throwing away a whole radio and micro controller. Get a smart switch and connect your regular bulb to that!
Tasmota is free open-source software that may be flashed into almost any ESP32-based smart plug, smart bulb, smart switch, etc. It communicates over WiFi and can use standard MQTT protocol, or http, or a bunch of other ways of communicating. No cloud required. I’ve been using it for over 15 years, with around 20 devices. And yes, my Tasmota system has replaced an earlier X-10 system that I had started back in 2001. The Tasmota system is equally local, much more flexible, and much more reliable. https://tasmota.github.io/docs/
Open source software to talk to the Home Director interface box via serial port is still available.
At least one of those packages also supports the other once-common X10 PC interface, which also connected to a serial port but was controlled by sequences of changes on the port’s status lines so it could share the port with another device. And yes, both this dongle and the Hone Director box could be put on the same port. (Downside of the dongle was that it was transmit only, whereas the interface box could also monitor X10 traffic and implement some home automation macros.)
Doubling up the controllers could sometimes be useful, since one of X10’s limitations was that signals did not always couple successfully from one phase of 120V/240V service to the other; this permitted putting a transmitter on each.
The original X10 company specialized in cheap electronic imports, with carrier – current home automation just being its best known product. (I have a few of the others as well.) Manufacturing quality was generally shoddy, with sloppy solder joints and the like, but the products were cheap and they generally worked. Once the X10 protocol established itself as a de facto open standard, other manufacturers came in with better made modules and interfaces, sometimes with protocol extensions such as dimming reliably to a specific level.
I still have a pile of X10 hardware, and have periodically thought about putting it back into service just because it’s available. So far, it has been preferable to get modern Z-Wave or zigbee devices. But I fondly remember the coworkers who used X10 and a small FM transmitter to set up complicated music-synchronized displays for major holidays.
The simple sending of the information at the 0 and 180 crossing of the AC power made it a great system. I still have a CM10 and CM13 firecracker module I used on my PC and Amiga back in the day. KISS (Keep It Simple Serial). ;)
I ran x10 in europe in the early 2000’s and it was the most unreliable piece of crap I ever invested in.
The CM13 europe version overheated badly and failed in hotter weather because of how they converted it electrically to work on 230v. In the end after 5 replacements I cut a hole in the case making it invalid for insurance purposes and added a heatsink and cooling fan on one that still runs.
The modules were a similar story, except the relays often stuck, and they used to go deaf after a few weeks or so. We used to reboot the entire house every week as a workaround for stuck modules. Occasionally every few months a module would not work after rebooting and need replacement. Meanwhile the heating system made from a parallel port bigbanged interface on a old laptop running linux, and ds1820 sensors in a serial network just ran flawlessly for years uptime.
Today I use shelly’s/esp32home & other devices in homeassistant after a period eval’ing their reliability. The only bad decision in the past few years has been zemismart blinds, which last about a year then fail. At which point the distributer wont honor the 2yr mandatory warantee. I contacted zemismart themselves, and they asked me for the purchase proof, and I provided then they just stopped answering.
So friends dont let friends buy zemismart, unless you want to recreate that x10 lets replace what failed this month excitement.
Ask your doctor if Aptiva is right for you…
“Breaking news, i found this little switch that’ll let us dim the lights in here”
“No! Don’t dim the lights!”
“I’m gonna dim the lights”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jp-20h78PqE