What's this, you ask? Why, only the coolest remote control you've
never seen before.
But, Linus, 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. >> 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 Wozniak. Oh, Woz
is pretty cool. Yeah. And did I mention that it still works all these years
later with many modern devices? I heard Woz plays polo on a Segway.
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We'll have that down below. When Woz, the great and powerful, left Apple for
the final time in 1985, the new company
he founded, called CL9, had a simple,
reliable mission: to eliminate the army
of remotes threatening the sovereignty of your living room once and for all.
And just 2 years later, he unveiled this, the CORE Master Programmable
Universal Remote Control. To say that this thing was
mind-blowingly 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 KB of
memory, a 100-page spiral-bound 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 hexadecimal digits? Clear as mud. But,
as you would expect from the Woz, 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 F 15? Yeah. It's the last
one. That wouldn't be 16? So, 16 options, they're numbered 0 to 15.
Yes. Very programmer words. Oh my god. Start counting at zero. So,
page 15, which is of course the 16th
page since it starts at zero and uh numbered F,
could be full of just random single commands, but then page 11 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. Woz 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 game changer. 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. Woz made a
universal remote control that could literally be programmed to reprogram
itself in 1987.
Genius. Mostly.
See, one glaring omission from the Core Master is the absence of any
non-volatile memory. I mean, in fairness, that had barely been invented,
but it does cause significant usability issues. See, 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 CoreMaster
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 our
device, and then we're going to program it into our CoreMaster.
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, wait, 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. >> can program another one and have 1987 start Netflix for you.
Let's do it. Okay, Netflix.
Okay. I'm going to turn enable off then.
So, okay. >> up uh It picked up me. So, let's just turn it off again.
>> no, hey, 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
when I was testing this out upstairs, I put all of the arrow keys in for the TV
upstairs. It was a Hisense. Everything worked flawlessly. This is
crazy. Okay. Do
Hit me. Left? Yep. Okay.
Eight. Do down. Down or okay?
Down.
Okay. 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 at lttstore.com. Our
notebook notebook. Or wait, which one is this? Whatever, it's a notebook.
You can get a screwdriver 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. >> D.
Hey, 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 seven C or
page eight 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.
I don't 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
user-friendly. It feels like exactly the sort of
solution that a genius multimillionaire might devise for a problem that only he
had at the time. There's no shortage of passion in this
device. Woz even said that he programmed the Apple II 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 that said, it doesn't mean the Core Master was a
complete failure. In fact, the device lived on as the PIC 100, and later the
PIC 200, marketed by Celadon, 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's going
to end until you get there. And you never know where the segway is
going to end.
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code LTT at checkout. We'll have that links 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.