About

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 and 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 2300 named professionals throughout Ireland and beyond.

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

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 (later knighted for his work in 2004)

The Instrumentation Signpost was born in June 1994 and it grew from a single page on the first day to over 500 pages today visited by a quarter of a million visitors a year.

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.” More recently this aspect was subsumed in the last two Pharmatex Events in Cork.

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