“Have you ever been…experienced?” — Jimi Hendrix, legendary musician
It continues to amaze me how our industry has grown and developed in the past four decades. Let’s take a time trip back to 1977 and imagine how alarm companies operated then. The company I started with was Guardian Alarm Systems of Atlanta, Ga. In the old days nearly every alarm company had its own central station, even if they only had a couple of hundred accounts. Most of the alarm signals were delivered via some form of “direct wire,” which were pairs of conductors leased/rented from the local telephone company; some other signals were delivered via pre-recorded “tape dialers” connected to a client’s phone line. Digital dialer communications were just getting off the ground.