Echelon"s system accomplishes the feat by attaching the dimmer (a resistor circuit) inside the lamp, with a neuron chip controlling it. The light switch merely sends a signal through the power line, telling the lamp"s neuron chip how much to brighten or dim. The lamp, like every appliance in an Echelon system, is programmed to recognize its own eight-bit binary code; when a transmission carrying its address passes by, it snags the instruction and responds. Echelon doesnot make the lamps or switches. It provides the infrastructure which connects them. It sells boards (with chips made by Toshiba and Motorola) to makers of appliances and other "smart" hardware. Developers also buy the kits for programming the chips (by attaching them to an IBM PC or clone), and the network interfaces, which link them across the developer"s choice of power lines, radio waves, telephone wire, or infrared beams. Notwithstanding industry skepticism, Echelon has managed to line up some of the largest consumer and building companies as customers, including AT&T, Honeywell, and the Swiss contracting giant Schlumberger. Like Apple, Echelon sends out "evangelists" to third-party developers to entice them into building with its chips (which cost $10 now, and are supposed to drop to $2 by 1995 - not much to add to the price of a crockpot or alarm system). But where Apple sought out freewheeling software designers, Echelon must cultivate a much more staid group: lighting manufacturers, security companies, and consumer electronics firms. Many demur because the home appliance industry has its own rival system, called CEBus (for "Consumer Electronics Bus"). Like MS-DOS in Apple"s early days, CEBus doesnot quite match the power or inventiveness of the California upstart, but it has the blessing of the establishment. The CEBus also has a big plus - the ability to carry video images - and a big minus - it doesnot quite exist yet. Because of the CEBus competition, Echelon is more likely to appear first in industrial circles. Locomotives and factory assembly lines, for instance, can have their massive (and expensive) electrical cable harnesses replaced with a single loop of wire exchanging messages between neuron chips connected to hundreds of devices within the machine. Eventually, autos might be built around Echelon systems; drivers could reconfigure their dashboards when the mood struck, as if they were setting new preferences in their computer software. ("I would like my mileage in kilometers today - or how about in leagues?") Markkula, who owns a cattle ranch, talks about strapping neuron chips to his cows hooves to check their weights from afar, or find a particular calf by triangulating a signal to a homing device. Small children, he muses, might carry similar chips to help their parents find them in a crowd. Echelon"s chief executive officer, Ken Oshman (formerly of the Rolm telephone system company), talks of sensors on a race car that instantly download performance data into diagnostic computers as it rolls into a pit stop. All sorts of innovations seem dazzlingly possible - light rail, smart factories, and ultimately homes as charming and responsive as those in Toon Town, in which everything you touch, from the doorbell to the commode, can have a customizable personality. Today, prototype neuron chips exist in Amtrak trains, shuffling the destination signs when cars are recoupled. In a Florida parking lot, they prompt lights to lead people as they walk to their cars. The French government is installing an Echelon system for apartment buildings; it can convert messages from Minitel (a French online system) to voice-mail and read them through a speaker in the wall. But the most commercially successful system so far is probably the liquor-dispensing apparatus in a casino in Loughlin, Nevada. Rows of bottles sit behind the bar, pointed downwards with tubes coming out of them. When the bartender rings up a sale, one chip calculates the change, another updates the inventory list, and a third controls the flow of liquor into the glass. Why the investment? To keep bartenders from pouring extra-heavy drinks. If Echelon"s world follows that pattern, it will be pitiless to rule- benders - thousands of chips implanted in everything from fireplugs to mailboxes could keep tabs on the people around them. Like many technologies, Echelon"s systems will have to find a way to guarantee the privacy of people who use them. They will also have to safeguard against intrusion - which they now accomplish with randomly generated authentication codes and passwords, much like the PIN codes of credit cards. As Markkula said, "You donot want anybody to be able to turn on your garbage disposal while your arm is in there."