I interned at a digital subscription television receiver manufacturer eons ago. One day I was given several boxes full of random remotes, a microcontroller with

I interned at a digital subscription television receiver manufacturer eons ago. One day I was given several boxes full of random remotes, a microcontroller with an IR receiver, and an oscilloscope. I spent the next month deciphering coding schemes for dozen of remotes, which were usually undocumented or documentation-contradicting. The amazing part was how little standardization even individual vendors had, with few encodings having any real advantage over others. The purpose of all of this was so the receiver could IR blast commands to the rest of the customers' devices. AFAIK the only place this was used was for triggering VCR recording, which was amusing given we were working on early DVRs. The whole time I was thinking how short-sighted this was given we'd certainly be using some standard protocol in a few years since the home media center was going digital. In the early 2000s all the incidental annoyances in digital electronics still seemed like temporary problems that would be swept away by constant disruption as they had been in the 90s, as opposed to the entrenched problems we were stuck with in other technologies.