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Information On Philips' "Coffee" Machine?
RogueWarrior65 writes "In the early 1970s, I was fortunate to discover the Ontario Science Centre in Toronto. For the Gen Y'ers out there who never knew a world without computers, to Gen X'ers, this place was the future. Computer technology was just beginning to be exposed to the world and this museum had the coolest exhibits around, most of which were interactive. One of the exhibits was a machine reminiscent of an old vending machine. On its face was a large circuit board with lights that spelled out the word 'coffee.' There were several dials and a button, which, when pressed, would cause the machine to speak the word. The knobs adjusted various inflections and tonal qualities of the speech. Feeling nostalgic, I inquired of the museum about this exhibit. Was it still there? If not, was it in storage somewhere and could I purchase it. I was told that the machine was developed by Philips Electronics but the exhibit was no longer in their collection. Then I asked Philips about it and was told that no, they have nothing in the archives, no schematics or parts list. A Google search is came up empty as well. Does anyone have any more information on this gadget?"
The purpose seems to be to "ASK SLASHDOT."
Here: The Science Page I found the following: "A machine which said 'COFFEE' which was located in the center hall. The machine was built from discrete components and had a series of coils and capacitors for filters and oscillators. Lamps lit up the letters "C", "O", "FF" and "EE" as the machine spoke. Visitors could vary parameters using analog pots to make the word sound different." So maybe Mark Csele knows.
Sure you aren't thinking about a Tim Horton's drive thru?
rewriting history since 2109
This machine used to be on permanent display in the Evoluon, a museum dedicated to technology and modern art in Eindhoven, the Netherlands. See here. This site is run by a man named Kees who may be able to answer your questions.
So, a quick search brought up this article from 2008 by Paul Shindman. http://www.canadasisrael.ca/2008/09/can-you-still-hitchhike-in-canada/ It looks to be just a reference, but you may want to contact Paul directly to see if he knows anything else. Happy hunting.
If you buy it. What do you plan on doing with it. Will you display it in a museum. Or will you keep it to your self. If you keep it to your self, I hope you make a good quality video of it. I wish you success in finding it.
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Also, check out this dutch forum ( Google Translation ) for more info and pics.
Right at the end of this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-_pZV3tDiw
I was going to post the exact same META: this is by far the best, most interesting Ask Slashdot entry I have ever seen. I wish the asker good luck.
By the way, I'm a hardware-kind-of-guy, and am of the same (retro) generation, so I will be following this adventure with much interest!
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
I loved that "coffee" machine. And all the interactive exhibits that are no longer there, everything from the huge logic gates to the parabolic microphones. At some point I think society switched from learning how to build things to just using them, and a lot of these kinds of changes reflect themselves in our "science" centres as well.
Slashdot: Everything in Moderation, including Moderation itself.
For those too lazy to copy/paste: The "machine" appears at 7:34
the machine was designed by philips and shown in the evoluon ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evoluon and http://www.evoluon.org/ ). you can find a little clip of it on youtube ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-_pZV3tDiw ) @ 6:55 and forward...
for me it was heaven as a kid... spending hours at that place... loved it!
The part of Philips that was into speech synthesis and recognition went through many different incarnations until it became part of Nuance.
D.O.U.O.S.V.A.V.V.M.
It had four distinct circuits, one for each phoneme ("C", "O", "FF" and "EE"), and a sequencer. You could vary the timing of the whole thing, and the individual frequencies of the phonemes. The "C" and "FF" sounds had a lot of white noise, with the "C" (well, "K") more plosive. The "O" and "EE" were purer waves, each a mix of two frequencies (which could be tweaked). Shorten the sequence timing and increase the frequency of that last "EE" phoneme and it sounded more like "KOFEEP?"
It wouldn't be too hard to reproduce the circuitry -- a handful of tunable oscillators, a couple of noise sources, and a sequencer -- but I think the questioner is more interested in an exact, not just functional, replica.
-- Alastair
This video was amazing, thanks for the link! A must-see for any fans of 1960s Venture Brothers type super-science.
Rather 06:59, unless the head 2-3 seconds before is part of it to.
In Amarok by Mike Oldfield, there's a bit that repeatedly goes "COFFEE, CO CO COFFEE" in weird a synthy voice. Is that related or a coincidence?
It belongs in a museum!
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Around 1977 we took a family camping trip to Toronto. You should have seen us as we went sightseeing. Adam was walking, Jenn was in a stroller and April was in a backpack. One of my favorite memories was Jenn playing with this machine. It would simply say the word "coffee" and there was a dial on it that would make it sound differently. Jenn loved this machine and I remember we had to drag her away from it. When I sent this article to Jenn (who is now 36) she responded, "Aww, it's a shame it's gone. I wonder what could have happened to it. Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go, um, make some coffee. In the closet."
What if I wanted it to say Coffee in English instead of Dutch? Could I use the same hardware?
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
I remember being somewhere in the mid-west in the 80's in a really crowded room when I heard someone someone ask for a coffee. In a different part of the room, another voice suddenly said "CoFFee!" in the unmistakable tone of the machine. Then another voice from somewhere else echoes "coffEE?". Within a second, a third voice replies "COFFee" in yet another tone.
I added my own, and then the four of us started to track each other down through the crowd with cries of
"CoFFeE?"
"COFFEE!"
Needless to say, the rest of the room thought we were insane or members of some bizarre cult.
I turned out there were three Ontarians and someone who had visited the Science Centre recently.
A lot of fun.
Here in Toronto, I still hear people of a certain age suddenly repeat "CofffEE!" for no apparent reason.
Freaks out the youngsters.
I'm told that after the machine was taken off display, it passed through several hands and is now the personal property of one Faheem Rasheed Najm. Sounds plausible to me.
If I could get a schematic and parts list, I'd build one and most likely post the PCB trace print or make PCBs available. Maybe Sparkfun or Make Magazine would be a good place.
This museum had a lot of cool stuff that would be considered trivial knowledge these days. Another really neat one was the thing used to demonstrate connected logic gate systems. It was made of an array of clear tubes at the top that would feed into large AND and OR gate symbols, perhaps other types of gates, I don't recall. You'd flip a bunch of toggle switches to configure which tubes would be fed with a ping-pong ball. Then the gate array would "process" the binary word. The goal was to get a ping-pong ball bit to appear at the one tube at the bottom. Fun stuff.
This is the post that gets modded up for denouncing the factually incorrect parent post and "corrects" the misinformation with horribly erroneous information of its own, further degrading the signal to noise ratio.
The UFO shaped Evoluon in Eindhoven had the same device, I remember playing with it in my youth. However, we're talking 40+ years ago (yes, I'm old), the UFO shaped building has changed from a Philips-sponsored exhibition to a conference centre. Sniff.. Your coffee machine is at approx 7:12 in. It also showed those *beautiful* relays that were used for telephones..
It may be worth calling the Philips media representatives in Eindhoven and ask - I'm positive Philips will have the drawings stashed away somewhere. I have noticed some discussion about the specific machine on some Dutch forums (Google for "evoluon koffie" and you'll find them). Sorry, it's in Dutch..
Good luck, and thanks for bringing back those memories - while you're at it, ask them where the giant nixie tubes went!
Insert
The coffee machine was developed by the Philips NatLab ("Natuurkundig Laboratorium"), the research and development labs of Philips in Eindhoven. Two of them were made. It was an early experiment in speech synthesis. The machine has been in the Evoluon exhibition on permanent display from the beginning in 1966 until it was closed in 1989. It was very popular and many people would start imitating the machine whenever coffee was mentioned. When the Evoluon exhibition was dismantled, many displays were given away to museums around the world. The coffee machine that had been in the Evoluon was given to the Ontario Science Centre in Toronto. No modifications needed to be made to it, since the word 'coffee' in English sounds the same as the word 'koffie' in Dutch.
The question what happened to the machine often comes up. Last time it was mentioned, I was told the Ontario Science Centre had thrown away the machine when it was taken out of the exhibition. The second coffee machine was given to the Erasmus University of Rotterdam. I am told they have since thrown away this machine as well.
I was working on getting some of the displays that were given to Dutch museums back into the Evoluon for a remembrance event a few years ago, but all I could get was the Time display. Some displays are still shown in several Dutch museums, but most of them are either thrashed or unrecognizable changed.
It will be hard to find out who exactly designed the coffee machine. Many of the people who worked at the NatLab or the Evoluon in the sixties are no longer among us. The NatLab has been reorganized many times since then and a lot of documentation of the past is lost. It's the same problem with the Senster, the giant interactive robot at the entrance to the Evoluon. Only because the widow of the artist who designed it had kept a lot of papers, some headway could be made into discovering how it worked.
Thanks for Slashdotting my site. I feel really famous now :)
Kees
http://www.facebook.com/sciencecentrememories?ref=ts The Ontario Science Centre Memory Bank is a Facebook group for sharing pics and notes about favorite displays and experiences at the OSC... They include a pic and some notes about the Philips Coffee Machine and it's current whereabouts... At last word it was held in a warehouse, needing spare parts. http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=3172797&id=64649215395
---- You are fully entitled to my opinion.
I was at the Ontario Science Museum in the early 90's where a "fish silo" was on display; this was a tall transparent cylinder about 5 feet in diameter with a spiraling floor from top to bottom. There was a downward flowing current through the spiral which the fish would swim against for exercise. It was billed as a super-efficient fish farm that allowed the fish to exercise in ways they couldn't (or didn't) in a regular pond farm and thus produced fish more like wild-caught. I asked about this a few years later and never could find anyone connected with the museum who'd ever heard of the thing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m-_pZV3tDiw
At the end of the video you can see a demonstration of the machine.
"I'll just chip in a bit for RedHat: I actually have that installed on my university machine." - Linus, '95