January 29, 2001

	Technology At Home
	Peter Schilling, CTO Authoria

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on't judge a book by its cover or a house by its facade. Outwardly, Authoria chief technology officer Peter Schilling's 100-year-old colonial on a quiet street in Dedham, Mass., is a paragon of traditional design and decor. In the main hallway is one of four working fireplaces that Schilling says give the house "a charming, country-inn feel." The home is furnished with antiques, while the exterior sports brown shingles trimmed in white.

Then there's the server in the basement. It's the nerve center of a home network that outstrips some corporate setups. But Schilling and his wife, Boston College Ph.D. candidate Helen Connolly, need to be connected. So he brought in the server, ripped out the house's vintage phone wiring and replaced it with triple Category 5 cabling, then installed a Siemens Gigaset small-business networking system. The upshot: "Helen and I can now plug in our laptops anywhere in the house that we happen to be," says Schilling, whose company runs business-to-business exchanges. That lets the couple work while keeping an eye on their two young daughters.

The server is a $250,000 Sun Microsystems E4500 on loan from a value-added reseller. "Some people borrow ladders. I borrow computers," Schilling says. The E4500 makes for an ideal home appliance, he says, "if your wife needs to crunch large data sets for econometric research."

Photos by Stephen Sherman

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