AWFUL LOT OF COFFEE

Dick Pountain/ Idealog 279 /05 October 2017 13:33

I love coffee. Or rather, I love making and drinking coffee - not talking about it, bragging about it or agonising over equipment choices. I neither roast nor grind my own beans, and am a stranger to the burr-grinder. Instead I work my way along Sainsbury's shelf of Fairtrade ground coffees (tip: Sumatra Mandheling is very nice). Occasionally, when I can be arsed, I go to the little guy in Delancey Street NW1 who employs gorgeous old-school gas roasters that give off sparks and fill the street with perfume. I do not buy any coffee that has passed through the alimentary canal of a tree-bound feliform, and avoid those hipster blends that have the pH of battery acid.

I've owned almost every type of maker, from horrid percolator to mini moka, over the last 50 years, but ended up preferring the espresso machine: living in Italy for 14 years will do that. I do *not* need to hear your stories about the Aeropress, and I've never owned a bean-to-cup machine because they combine the most irritating features of the laser printer and the photocopier: whenever you want a shot, some damned internal organ is either full or empty, and it tells you so on its horrid LCD display. I've had to buy several "desktop" espresso machines over the years - their pumps tend to expire two weeks after the warranty does - but still doubt I've spent the price of a bean-to-cup. 

I hear you all mutter "What's all this got to do with computers. He's finally lost the plot...", but I do have a connection, and it's not just that programmers run on coffee. The first book I ever had published was "A Tutorial Introduction To Occam Programming" in 1987, commissioned by Inmos and co-written with David May. When I began writing, the only parallel  demo program they could give me to work from was, you guessed it, to run a coffee machine. A classic real-time, concurrent problem, how to run heater and pump while also handling user input. I never actually got to build a coffee machine controlled by a transputer, and it would have been way too expensive. 

As a result of this early experience I developed a fascination with the user-interface of the espresso machine. Apart from switching it on and off there are really only three things you need to ask of it, namely to deliver coffee, deliver hot water or deliver steam to froth milk. You should be able to accomplish this with at most three buttons and lights, but it's astonishing what a pig's ear many manufacturers have made of it. Many try to skimp by only having two buttons or lights, which introduces needless combinations and confusions. Some of them believe a pressure gauge  adds to the machismo, but the fact is that if a machine doesn't already know what 15 Bar feels like then it's a bomb rather than a coffee maker.

Anyhow, my last machine's pump conked out a while ago and I replaced it with De Longhi's cute little Dedica EC680M. Narrow as a pod machine and beautiful in brushed-chrome and black, its user interface was designed by someone who gives damn - and who ought to be teaching UX design in Redmond. It has just three buttons with back-lit icons on them that depict one cup, two cups and a puff of steam. There's no LCD display and no menu, everything being controlled by a simple protocol based on the state of these icons: unlit, steady-lit or flashing. They can flash sequentially to indicate programming mode, in which you can set coffee temperature, water hardness and auto-off period by a short press. But the truly marvellous feature - which set me skipping round the kitchen when I discovered it - is the way you set how much coffee is delivered for one-cup or two-cups. Press the requisite button, hold it until it's delivered as much as you want, let go and it remembers that until further notice...

Staggeringly simple, highly effective, almost biological, being the way that many neuronal operations behave inside our brains. It's also so simple as to be beyond the designers of much computer software. In 2017 I still, every day, encounter programs in both Windows and ChromeOS that won't remember the last menu option you chose, hence forcing you back to the top and rendering some repetitive operations unspeakably tedious. Of course no protocol is entirely impervious to error, and rarely I'll press something at the wrong time, upset the sequencing and all the lights just flash. In that case an error handling routine is needed, and De Longhi's designer chose the most sophisticated and most popular one there is: turn it off and turn it back on again.