This story is part of CNET at 25, celebrating a quarter century of industry tech and our role in telling you its story.
Brett Pearce/CNET
In a Washington Post article published Nov. 3, 1990, author H. Jane Lehman predicted that the coming decade would bring a new wave of home automation. Decades before it became widespread, she even used the phrase "smart home." But she also said that something was missing: "What the home automation community is waiting for is an industry standard that would tell builders and remodelers how to wire homes for total automation."
But connecting a smart home with wires wouldn't be the standard the industry was waiting for. No one knew it at the time, but Lehman and everyone else was really waiting for Wi-Fi.
Without Wi-Fi, the smart home industry wouldn't exist. And without reliable Wi-Fi, today's smart home wouldn't work. That's why establishing a solid wireless setup is always the first thing CNET recommends when someone asks how to get started with smart home tech.
That's why I'm taking you back to the mid-1990s to celebrate CNET's 25th year of being, well, du lịch bắc kinh CNET -- and du lịch bắc kinh the late '90s invention that made the smart home possible: Wi-Fi.
Read more: These 8 products inspired the smart home revolution
But first, what is the smart home?
Physical stores and online retailers alike have curated "smart home" sections nowadays, dedicated to this seemingly incongruous mishmash of home appliances. And du lịch bắc kinh smart devices are popular -- 69% of US homes report owning at least one, according to a 2018 survey by research firm Traqline.
The smart home as we now know it didn't really take off until the 2010s, but it's been predicted for much longer. A quick search of ads from the 1950s and '60s yields countless examples of autonomous robots and other visions of the future that have since become a reality. And, while slow cookers, programmable thermostats and other "non-smart" devices may not count as 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 that tied into phone lines.
But Wi-Fi, the "industry standard" that would enable wireless connectivity and automation in a whole new way, wouldn't be introduced until 1997.
