Apple’s Co-Founder Left to Make THIS?? - CORE Master Universal Remote

What's this, you ask? Why? Only the coolest remote control you've never seen before. Bow. But Lionus, you might say, "It looks like you stole that from a hospital." Well, that's actually a funny story, but we'll get to that later. First, did you know that this bad boy is in the Guinness Book of World Records? How many TV remotes can say that? Four. Really? Oh, that's more than I expected. But those other three are not the world's very first programmable universal remote. And none of them were made by Steve freaking Wniaak. Oh, W is pretty cool. Yeah, and did I mention that it still works all these years later with many modern devices? I heard W plays polo on a Segway to our sponsor, Sy. If you're traveling, make sure you stay connected with your loved ones back home using SY. With SLY, you don't have to hunt for Wi-Fi in foreign countries, and you can say no to sketchy SIM providers at the airport. And the best part is you can save 15% on your sale eim data plan at s.com/ltt. We'll have that down below. When was the great and powerful left Apple for the final time in 1985, the new company he founded called CL9 had a simple relatable mission to eliminate the army of remotes threatening the sovereignty of your living room once and for all. And just two years later, he unveiled this, the Core Master Programmable Universal Remote Control. To say that this thing was mindblowingly ahead of its time would be a serious understatement. Now, remote controls themselves weren't a new thing. Even wireless remotes had existed since about the mid 1950s, but the ones that most people were actually using back in the 80s looked more like this. So when the Core rolled onto the scene with its dual microcontroller architecture, 36 kilobyt of memory, a 100page spiralbound manual, and an interface that only a programmer could love. The public didn't even know what they were looking at. And honestly, I can't really blame them. What are these buttons? A, B, and C minus P. And then we've got these 16 ones that are labeled with hexadimal digits. clear as mud, but as you would expect from the W, there's an elegant logic beneath its obtuse surface. The interface is organized into 16 pages that you select by pressing the page button and then one of the 16 buttons below. If you don't want to do all of that, your most frequently accessed pages can be bound to the three quick page buttons here, A, B, or C. Each page can store up to 16 commands or and this is the really cool part 16 sequences of commands as long as those commands are somewhere in the remote's memory. So page 15 or F. Wait, is F15? Yeah, it's the last one. That wouldn't be 16. So 16 options. They're numbered 0 to 15. Yes. Very programming word. Very programmer. Oh my god. start counting at zero. So, page 15, which is of course the 16th page since it starts at zero and numbered F, could be full of just random single commands. But then page 1 could have a blockbuster and chill sequence that dims the lights, fires up the CRT projector, and tunes the hi-fi all with a single button press. But wait, what's that? You're worried about remembering what you've programmed into each button? Well, don't worry. W has you covered. The Core Master included a handy paper journal where you could write down what you've programmed into each button for your own reference. Okay, that's pretty janky. But come on, guys. This was an era where your VCR could at best be programmed to start and stop at a specific time of day. The core, by contrast, had the potential to be a gamecher. Let's say you wanted to record several programs on different channels while you were away on vacation. You could set the core to turn on your cable box, wait a couple of seconds for it to warm up, change the channel, turn on the VCR, record the first program, then turn everything off until the next program you wanted to record was scheduled, rinse and repeat. You could even program it to adjust for daylight savings time changing while you were away. Thanks to its built-in timers, you can even modify the frequency and the repeat rates of your captured IR signals to make sure that those automated sequences don't get messed up if you accidentally hold the button on your source remote a little too long while you're training the core master. And if that wasn't enough, those stored sequences could also include the programming buttons cleverly hidden under this little slider. That's right, you guys. was made a universal remote control that could literally be programmed to reprogram itself in 1987. Genius mostly. See, one glaring omission from the CoreM is the absence of any nonvolatile memory. I mean, in fairness, that had barely been invented, but it does cause significant usability issues. If the batteries ever go flat, you lose not only whatever you've programmed into the device, but also its entire firmware. To overcome that weakness, the core includes a secondary lithium battery that's designed to keep the memory alive in the event that the primary bank of AAA batteries is dead or removed. The bad news is that it only lasts for about 40 hours. So, this has a very similar issue to early pocket PCs where if you let them go flat, you're starting from scratch. Now, in fairness, the CoreM retailed for something like $200 back in 1987. So, it's not an unfair assumption that you would be using it so frequently that you would notice the low battery warning with plenty of time. But nowadays, when you're buying one of these off eBay, it's a big problem. Luckily, Digi Key still stocks the appropriate battery, and you can download both the tools to flash the firmware and the firmware itself from this website. So far, so good. Unfortunately, you also need to have or make the serial interface unit and snap that into place where the IR interface usually lives in order to reprogram the remote, which takes about 15 minutes. By the way, did we even mention that it has a modular interface at the front yet? Like, how cool is this? Anyway, that's a little bit off topic right now. Shout out our new pal Ray, the guy behind this awesome website who took care of the battery replacement and the reprogramming for us, which means that all I need to do is try it out. Come on out here, pancrats. We're going to start with something easy. We're going to learn the power command for a device, and then we're going to program it into our core master. We've got the remote for the LG Swing that you've got right behind you there. Cool. And this guy is IR. So, we should be able to just learn it on this guy. Okay. So, you just press any button to power it on. Let's go to a page that I haven't programmed anything into yet. So, let's go to page five. Oh, right. Hold on. Page five. Yep. All right. We're on page five. So, pick the button that you want to program to. You can start at A or you can start at one. Doesn't really matter. I'm going to go with what makes sense to my reptile brain. And I'm going to go with one. So, hit the one key. Now, you've got 51 in the display there. Beautiful. If you pop open the programming stuff at the bottom, you can't change any of the programs without hitting the enable button first. And now we'll hit the do button on the bottom to start programming capture. And you've got this little L here showing that you're starting a sequence. Okay. So now we can just Oh, there we go. C is captured. Damn. So now that we're done that, you can stop the program with Okay. and give it a shot right behind you. Okay, there you go. It's just that easy. It's It's actually kind of elegant. 1987. That's crazy. Okay, let's find out if it's a toggle then. It is. It is. 1987. Okay. Hey, you can program another one and have 1987 start Netflix for you. Let's do it. Okay. Netflix. Okay, I'm going to turn enabled off then. So, it picked up uh it picked up me. So, let's turn it off again. No, no. Hey, put that away. We don't need that anymore. We only use this now. Off. Got him. Can't imagine the look on my wife's face if I put this on the coffee table, though. There you go. And then I I could put I could put arrow keys in. Yeah. No, with the uh Okay, when I was testing this out upstairs, I put all of the arrow keys in for the TV upstairs. It was a High Sense. Everything worked flawlessly. This is crazy. Okay. Do hit me left. Yep. Okay. Eight. Do down. Down or Okay. Down. Enable off. All right. Now I just have to remember all of that. So home I should be able to Dude, this is so cool. Okay, so I could uh I could open up YouTube. Okay, core master. Dude, this is like actually usable though if you have a like giant brain and you can remember your TV interface on here somehow. Well, I had uh I had notes for when I was doing stuff, right? I had pen troubles, too. But solid solid journal uh available ltstore.com. Our notebook notebook or wait, which one is this? Whatever. It's a notebook. You can get a scribe driver to write in it. Can Can we make it do more? Yeah, I mean we can do a program. So, let's do something super super easy where you might want to move the volume up like five or six steps or something like that. So, let's program volume up into there. We can use like the number three. It doesn't really matter. Oh, yeah. You can use C and D. CN D. Okay, there we go. Just like that. Easy peasy. You want to move it up 10 steps with one button. I mean, not really, but sure. So, what you want to do, just start the way you did before. Choose a button that you want to bind to first. Enable. Yeah. Oh, okay. So, this is easy. Then, if I want to turn my volume down really fast, then all I've got to do is go do this, this, this, this, this. Okay. Yeah. So theoretically I could go up volume, up volume, up volume, up volume. Okay, so I'm at 10. And then I hit this. Boom. Five. And you can go a step further and actually choose functions from other pages. So instead of just hitting the C button, you could go page 7 C or page 8 B and then access the different functions that way. So, I could have bathroom break where I press one button and it'll pause playback and turn up the house lights. Yeah, you can actually go a step further with the programming. This is deeper than I'll go right now. You can add loops. So, it will do an action five like do a series of actions five times, then move on to the next step. Why' you want to do that? I don't know. But you can do it. Absolutely incredible, isn't it? I mean, fun fact, DVDs didn't show up in the US until about 10 years after this remote came out. And it was four more years after that before Harmony was ever a thing. So, why did this not only not take off, but no one seems to have even heard of it? Well, for starters, as I've alluded to before, it wasn't cheap, and it wasn't especially userfriendly. It feels like exactly the sort of solution that a genius multi-millionaire might devise for a problem that only he had at the time. There's no shortage of passion in this device. W even said that he programmed the Apple 2 assembly language into this thing so that you could program it just like your Apple computer. So, it was perfect for the highly educated, low-level programmer geek in your life and quite literally no one else. So, if you ask me what went wrong, I would say that it was just too advanced. And by the time that multiple remote anxiety became a mainstream issue, CL9 was out of business and other cheaper, simpler solutions were coming to the market. Either in the form of universal remotes that had codes for thousands of devices pre-programmed in or single vendor solutions where your TV remote came with buttons that worked for a matching VCR or AV receiver or both. So, if there's a lesson in all of this, I would say it is do your market research. Even now, advanced programmable remotes are pretty niche devices. And as CEC continues to improve, please improve CEC and more things shift away from IR control, they're probably going to get even more niche. But all of that said, it doesn't mean the Core Master was a complete failure. In fact, the device lived on as the PIK 100 and later the PIC 200, marketed by Seladon, a custom remote control company who appears to have adapted it for use on X-ray machines. This has actually been spotted, well, not quite this, but the other ones in use as recently as the late 2000s, about 20 years after its introduction. I guess you never know where the story is going to end until you get there. And you never know where the segue is going to end. To our sponsor, Sy, surely you're counting down the days until your next vacation. You earned it, by the way. Or maybe it isn't time yet, but you have a business trip coming up. Regardless, it's important to stay connected while you're visiting places that don't happen to be home, and you shouldn't be paying obscene amounts in roaming fees. Well, thanks to SLY, you don't have to. You can download their ESIM one time and you'll be able to pick up affordable plans in over 200 countries. Want to backpack across Europe this summer? They even have global and regional plans so you can save even more money. Choosing a SEAL eim is so much easier than scouring the globe for Wi-Fi hotspots with weird to agreements in a foreign land. They're compatible with all iOS and Android devices and they even offer 24/7 support. So don't wait. Get a 15% discount on a sale eim data plan by downloading the sale app and using code LTT at checkout. We'll have that linked down below. If you guys enjoyed this video, maybe check out the time we got an old Soviet era mouse working. That had some seriously 80s vibes.