Boston has had an electrical fire alarm system for over 100 years. There are hundreds of call boxes located on city streets. You pull a handle on one of those boxes and an alarm rings in the city's Fire Alarm building. The dispatcher can determine which box was pulled and the location. The city licensed the technology from Samuel Morse, who was living in town at the time. There's a modern digital system as well, but the fire alarm boxes still work
(I've been inside the Fire Alarm building and seen the original wiring from the 1920s. It is beautiful.)
But do other cities use the system used in Boston? That seems to me to be the root of the problem: a lack of standard ways to do standard things. Here in my city I once got involved with a system that:
* sent serial characters over a modem on a dedicated phone line.
* the characters ended up in a hacked printing terminal.
* that closed a relay that rang the gong in the fire station after the printing terminal had generated the associated document.
So yay! We solved the problem. Unfortunately such "one off" systems tend to be maintenance nightmares (which is where I came in).
Even more remarkable that the person who gave testimony on it is named Charles Moore. I'm assuming it isn't the Charles Moore who invented Forth - although that would be wild.
Boston has had an electrical fire alarm system for over 100 years. There are hundreds of call boxes located on city streets. You pull a handle on one of those boxes and an alarm rings in the city's Fire Alarm building. The dispatcher can determine which box was pulled and the location. The city licensed the technology from Samuel Morse, who was living in town at the time. There's a modern digital system as well, but the fire alarm boxes still work
(I've been inside the Fire Alarm building and seen the original wiring from the 1920s. It is beautiful.)