One of the wow factors of the house was that each guest would be given a wireless badge connected to the servers, and after initially recording your preferences, the house would change the pictures in the digital frames on the walls, the temperature and the background music in each room depending on your taste.

Gates' dream was to have every house like this and this year Microsoft unveiled new consumer technologies that do exactly this for the average home. Microsoft would like every home owner to use its software to their houses into these Microsoft future homes using the new Microsoft table-top PCs and even touch-screen computers embedded into fridges.

However, Microsoft might be too late, since a lot of what is promised is already possible right here, right now. Far from the future as imagined by the Jetsons but just a few steps from the vision of Bill, many homes in this country already have networks capable of running entertainment systems, displaying digital art and interacting with you. All you need to do is buy some off-the-shelf hardware.

Not five years ago, tech people had romantic ideas of homes with network points in each room, and wires from these points all going back to one central location where a server or servers would connect all the points to the net. The idea was that we could plug our TVs and videos and computers into these points and they could all talk to each other and move films from computers to the TV or stream music from the internet to the stereo.

The rapid evolution of wireless technologies since then has made most wiring obsolete. Of the 600,000 broadband connections in this country, over half have wireless modems and as such already have a networked home. Those with wired modems can buy wireless ones for less than 50 and instantly have their own network.

We can buy much cheaper . . . though smaller . . .digital frames that can display the hundreds or thousands of digital photos we have in our collections, or with wireless digital frames, grandparents can have the frames automatically update themselves with the latest pictures of their grandkids in Australia, all using free software that comes with the frames. We can already stream films from our computers to the TV using hardware like the Streambox or using the Wii games console.

Instead of the invisible Star Trek computer, we can buy an artificial Rabbit with twittering ears called a Nabaztag which can read your work email in the morning, tell you the latest news headlines tailored to your interests, read out your schedule for the day and take voice commands to do anything on your home computer from sending email to playing music. Like the Bill Gates home, the Nabaztag can recognise wireless badges and tailor its behaviour to the badge owner . . . all for 150 and available now in Ireland. We already have the technological home of the future, all we need to do is plug into it.