When I was a student I felt like the time had come for some modern way of being woken up. I had a Philips CD-player and a Commodore 64. On the back of that CD-player was an RCA connector marked 'remote control'. I sent a letter to Philips with a request for information on that protocol and some kind soul sent me some pages of timing definitions and encodings. I made an adapter to go between the C64 user bus and that CD-player, wrote an alarm-clock program which could be told to 'play track X at time Y' and off I went...