Coffee in the morning

Coffee in the morning was Originally Posted on March 2, 2009 by lavarock

In the ALT.COFFEE newsgroup, a writer asked how he could turn on his coffee pot in the morning before he was ready to get out of bed. I replied with my story, then decided to post it here too. I hope you enjoy it:

My story…

Back in the 1980’s, I and a friend who worked for Penril (a modem company) decided to play with the mainframe computer my boss had. The HP3000 cost well over $150,000 even back then and came with serial/parallel ports (25 pin connectors) which went to printers and modems. It was possible to write programs which would toggle one of those pins to have or not have voltage.

Jeff created a small computer which would look at the pin and supply 120 volts to an electrical outlet. This is when people actually took computer parts and made things with them, rather than buy things off the shelf.

We created a program which would look at a table of times and toggle that pin on the connector. The night before we would load water in the coffee pot and coffee in the filter and leave the office. At say 6am in the morning, the coffee pot would start up and the coffee would brew. The boss would appear minutes later and start his day. The unit was dubbed CPC-1 (Coffee Pot Controller – version 1).

We never marketed it, but years later home automation became quite common. A process called X-10 came along and commoners (people without mainframes) could start coffee pots. You may see X-10 products in Lowes and Home Depot, where you use the electrical wires in your house to control lamps far away. Although X-10 has some problems, it is not uncommon to use it to light your house, open and close curtains in the AV room, etc.

I used to have an iron I would forget to turn off before leaving fro work. Well, I THINK I forgot to turn off… anyway, I plugged it into the X-10 controller in the bathroom and the main box was in the computer room. It used house wiring for its signal delivery. Each 1/2 hour it forced the outlet to turn off, just in case I forgot to do it manually; thus the iron, if left on, would never run for more than an hour. I even had a module which answered the phone and I could remotely turn on or off appliances and lights from a cell phone.

Another company finally created software which listens to your voice. You set up a few microphones around the house and add a few control phrases to the system. Thus you can speak commands and they happen.

“Computer…”,

“YES MASTER”,

“Turn coffee pot on”,

TURNING COFFEE POT ON”

It really worked that way!

So yes, there are ways to start your coffee pot, but some are more complex and novel than others.

The true coffee lovers here will suggest that you not leave ground coffee out all night and water in the pot to perhaps lose some of its oxygen, etc, and that you may sacrifice some taste for convenience.

The alternative to that is to hire a butler…

“Jeeves…”,
“YES MASTER”,
“Turn coffee pot on”,
TURNING COFFEE POT ON”