From gdmr@ed.lfcs Wed Apr 10 09:26:01 1991
Received: from subnode.lfcs.ed.ac.uk (cs1mgr) by lfcs.ed.ac.uk; Wed, 10 Apr 91 09:25:58 BST
Date: Wed, 10 Apr 91 09:25:17 BST
Message-Id: <3277.9104100825@subnode.lfcs.ed.ac.uk>
To: jhb@ed.lfcs, gordon@ed.lfcs
Subject: You'll like this...
Status: RO
In article <40493@netnews.upenn.edu>, rsk@hazel.circ.upenn.edu (Rick Kulawiec) writes:
> In article <1991Apr4.182115.3531@watson.ibm.com> metzger@watson.ibm.com (Perry E. Metzger) writes:
> >The RFC for finger specifies fingers behavior when applied to coke
> >machines. It is my understanding that CMU used to have a coke machine
> >on the internet that followed the stated behavior, although this may
> >be an urban legend.
>
> I think it was for real...the three notes below cover the story,
> and are probably worth reposting here since it's been a while since
> they first appeared.
>
> ---Rsk
>
> Originally-From: tgl@zog.cs.cmu.edu (Tom Lane)
> Original-Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
> Original-Subject: The only Coke machine on the Internet
> Original-Date: 11 Dec 89 15:45:34 GMT
>
> This story is old news to ex-CMU folk, but may be amusing to others.
>
> Since time immemorial (well, maybe 1970) the Carnegie-Mellon CS department
> has maintained a departmental Coke machine, which sells bottles of Coke
> for a dime or so less than other vending machines around campus. As no
> Real Programmer can function without caffeine, the machine is very popular.
> (I recall hearing that it had the highest sales volume of any Coke machine
> in the Pittsburgh area.) The machine is loaded on a rather erratic
> schedule by grad student volunteers.
>
> In the mid-seventies expansion of the department caused people's offices
> to be located ever further away from the main terminal room where the Coke
> machine stood. It got rather annoying to traipse down to the third floor
> only to find the machine empty; or worse, to shell out hard-earned cash to
> receive a recently loaded, still warm Coke. One day a couple of people got
> together to devise a solution.
>
> They installed microswitches in the Coke machine to sense how many bottles
> were present in each of its six columns of bottles. The switches were
> hooked up to CMUA, the PDP-10 that was then the main departmental
> computer. A server program was written to keep tabs on the Coke machine's
> state, including how long each bottle had been in the machine. When you
> ran the companion status inquiry program, you'd get a display that might
> look like this:
>
> EMPTY EMPTY 1h 3m
> COLD COLD 1h 4m
>
> This let you know that cold Coke could be had by pressing the lower-left
> or lower-center button, while the bottom bottles in the two right-hand
> columns had been loaded an hour or so beforehand, so were still warm.
> (I think the display changed to just "COLD" after the bottle had been
> there 3 hours.)
>
> The final piece of the puzzle was needed to let people check Coke status
> when they were logged in on some other machine than CMUA. CMUA's Finger
> server was modified to run the Coke status program whenever someone
> fingered the nonexistent user "coke". (For the uninitiated, Finger
> normally reports whether a specified user is logged in, and if so where.)
> Since Finger requests are part of standard ARPANET (now Internet)
> protocols, people could check the Coke machine from any CMU computer by
> saying "finger coke@cmua". In fact, you could discover the Coke machine's
> status from any machine anywhere on the Internet! Not that it would do
> you much good if you were a few thousand miles away...
>
> As far as I know nothing similar has been done elsewhere, so CMU can
> legitimately boast of having the only Coke machine on the Internet.
>
> The Coke machine programs were used for over a decade, and were even
> rewritten for Unix Vaxen when CMUA was retired in the early eighties.
> The end came just a couple years ago, when the local Coke bottler
> discontinued the returnable, coke-bottle-shaped bottles. The old machine
> couldn't handle the nonreturnable, totally-uninspired-shape bottles, so it
> was replaced by a new vending machine. This was not long after the New
> Coke fiasco (undoubtedly the century's greatest example of fixing what
> wasn't broken). The combination of these events left CMU Coke lovers
> sufficiently disgruntled that no one has bothered to wire up the new
> machine.
>
> I'm a little fuzzy about the dates, but I believe all the other details
> are accurate. The man page for the second-generation (Unix) Coke programs
> credits the hardware work to John Zsarnay, the software to David Nichols
> and Ivor Durham. I don't recall who did the original PDP-10 programs.
>
> tom lane
>
> ==========
> Orginally-From: sgw@cad.cs.cmu.edu (Stephen Wadlow)
> Orginal-Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
> Orginal-Subject: Re: The only Coke machine on the Internet
> Orginal-Date: 11 Dec 89 20:26:30 GMT
>
> In article <7295@pt.cs.cmu.edu> tgl@zog.cs.cmu.edu (Tom Lane) writes:
> >This story is old news to ex-CMU folk, but may be amusing to others.
> [story of the CMU coke machine]
>
> At the annual Jimmy Tsang's dinner expedition last saturday, I
> was talking with a member of the CS Facilities staff [Hi Steve :-)]
> who is currently working on the new hardware for the coke server.
> In addition to monitoring the status of the coke machine, the new
> server will re-implement the JF (junk food) protocol, telling you
> the status of the CS M&M dispenser and other CS-affiliated junk
> food dispensers. It's hoped that this will all be finished and installed
> by early next year, such that any internet site will be able to
> finger coke@cs.cmu.edu once again.
>
> An addendum to the coke story is that for quite sometime there was a
> Perq sitting behind a large glass window in front of the elevators
> on the third floor of science hall that frequently ran a variation
> of the coke program that would display bar graphs indicating the
> amount of time since the machine had been filled. You now didn't
> even have to be logged in to find out if the coke was cold, rather
> you could just be riding by on the elevator and decide on the fly
> if you wanted to grab a cold coke.
>
> You used to (and still may) be able to finger weather@hermes.ai.mit.edu
> to find out what the weather was like on the 9th floor of tech square
> (the ai labs).
>
> steve
>
> ==========
> Originally-From: colbath@cs.rochester.edu (Sean Colbath)
> Original-Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers
> Original-Subject: Re: The only Coke machine on the Internet
> Original-Date: 11 Dec 89 19:01:21 GMT
>
> I don't think the students at RIT (Rochester Institute of Technology) get
> this newsgroup, so I'll relate this (true) story. At UR, there is an
> organization known as the Computer Interest Floor, an area of campus housing
> where computer oriented people can get together. RIT has a similar
> organization, known as CSH (Computer Science House, or...). Many of their
> members are quite hardware oriented. Well, apparently they found an old
> slightly malfunctioning coke machine that was being thrown out (can-style).
> They decided to install this on their hall, but were informed by the powers
> that be that the university had granted a monopoly on vending machines to a
> city vending machine service, and they couldn't set it up. So, they decided
> to come up with a way to get around this rule: they changed the coke
> machine from a vending machine to a peripheral!
>
> The vending machine has a serial line running from it to one of the unix
> systems. It looks much like a regular machine, except it has a red
> calculator-like display that says "Coke" on it. If you press a button,
> it'll tell you how many sodas are in that particular bin, or "Empty". Next
> to it is a terminal with the time of day displayed, and a coke logo. To buy
> a coke, all you have to do is to "log on" to your coke machine account at
> the terminal, look at the status report, and "buy" your coke by selecting
> from a menu. Each user had a bank account that was added to by giving the
> machine maintainers more money.
>
> Now, this isn't all -- you could buy your coke from any terminal in their
> housing section (every room had one, and they had two semi-public terminal
> areas. If you wanted to, you could program in a delay before the machine
> dropped your coke, so you wouldn't get down the hall to find someone had
> snarfed your coke. Apparently they wanted coke to come do a commercial
> showing someone hacking on a terminal, pausing with a thirsty look on their
> face, type "coke", race down the hallway, and arrive just in time to have
> the machine plop a soda in their hand...!
>
> Sean Colbath
> colbath@cs.rochester.edu ...uunet!rochester!colbath
--
George D M Ross, Department of Computer Science, University of Edinburgh
031-650 5147 or 031-667 1081 gdmr@uk.ac.ed.cs (or cs.ed.ac.uk if you prefer)
From gdmr@ed.lfcs Wed Apr 10 09:27:53 1991
Received: from subnode.lfcs.ed.ac.uk (cs1mgr) by lfcs.ed.ac.uk; Wed, 10 Apr 91 09:27:52 BST
Date: Wed, 10 Apr 91 09:27:10 BST
Message-Id: <3290.9104100827@subnode.lfcs.ed.ac.uk>
To: jhb@ed.lfcs, gordon@ed.lfcs
Subject: More...
Status: RO
In article <1991Apr5.192823.400@spool.cs.wisc.edu>, hollings@poona.cs.wisc.edu (Jeff Hollingsworth) writes:
> |>
> |> As far as I know nothing similar has been done elsewhere, so CMU can
> |> legitimately boast of having the only Coke machine on the Internet.
> |>
>
> Here at the University of Wisconsin we were *FORCED* to computerize our Coke
> machine a year ago (or they would take it away). The University had
> given an exclusive vending contract to a local vending company. That company
> didn't like the fact we were under cutting their prices. But they did permit
> "coffee clubs" to continue. The idea was people would pay into a club and
> then only people who payed in could take coffee from the pot. We decided to
> do the same thing with our Coke machine. A small bit of hardware was built to
> activiate the Coke machine via a computer, and a program was written to track
> coke accounts and keep their balances. The coke machine was also modified so
> that it would NOT take money and could only be activated from the computer.
> So I guess Wisconsin can claim the only Coke machine that can be controlled
> via the Internet.
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Jeff Hollingsworth Work: (608) 262-6617
> Internet: hollings@cs.wisc.edu Home: (608) 256-4839
> X.400:
--
George D M Ross, Department of Computer Science, University of Edinburgh
031-650 5147 or 031-667 1081 gdmr@uk.ac.ed.cs (or cs.ed.ac.uk if you prefer)