Background to Read-out.net

Read-out first appeared around thirty years ago. It was founded as a house journal for the company Industrial Instruments Ltd (IIL) in the seventies, edited first by the late Maurice W Bryan and then by Eoin Ó Riain. It was published periodically until IIL closed in 1987.

When IIL closed Eoin Ó Riain started to publish regularly every second month from 1989 on.

This succeeded and Read-out today is sent to 2000 named professionals throughout Ireland and beyond four times a year..

Read-out participates in any exhibition or event in the area of measurement, control, and automation.

The first Directory of Instrumentation in Ireland was published by Read-out in 1991.

In 1994 there was discussion about a new means of communication - the internet - and Read-out investigated this and ways in which it could be harnessed to assist its readers.

First a search was conducted to find sites concerning measurement, control and automation throughout the world. These were compiled in to what nowadays would be called an e-newsletter and this was sent to readers of the magazine who had email addresses at the time.

There was however one disadvantage with this method of doing things. When the newsleter was sent out the information it contained was no longer available.

To make a long story short the answer was found in this new thing called the Web – www. Even though the internet had been around for over twenty years the web was an innovation invented by the Englishman Tim Berners Lee (Only lately knighted for his work in 2004)

The Instrumentation Signpost was born in June 2004 and it grew from a single page on the first day to over 400 pages today visited by a quarter of a million visitors in 2003.

The Read-out Forum was inaugurated in 1998 as a means of examining subjects to our subscribers. There have been two of these to date one on Fieldbus and the other on "Measurement and Control in the age of communications."

In the beginning of 2004 Read-out relocated from Dublin to Conamara in the west of Ireland.

The pages are in English as the majority of the information is available in that language, though there is a substantial amount of information in Germen and French and other languages too.

November 1996 issue1996
First full colour issue.

Directiry 1991

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