[the_third_wave]

Let's set the clock back to 1989, I'm a student at an agricultural university in the Netherlands who just got himself his first CD-player. The thing had an RCA connector on the back marked RC-5 which turned out to be a remote control protocol [1]. Of course there was no Wikipedia back then but we did have a working postal system. I wrote a letter to Philips asking them to provide me some details on this RC-5 protocol and that connector on my new drive so I could create something to interface with it.

A week or so later I got a big envelope containing the electrical characteristics of the connection as well as the timing and coding details for RC-5. Using that data I created an RC-5 interface for the user port on my Commodore-64 which I controlled through an RC-5 driver I created in assembler. Using the C-64, the driver and the adapter I made myself a musical alarm which did wonders for my house mates' early morning rest when I happened to leave the volume on the amplifier a tad too high. I'm pretty sure I was the only one using a 70W hifi alarm clock back then, at least at my university.

Now I just set my phone. Boring.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RC-5