
The “Only” Coke Machine on the Internet (1998) - gkop
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~coke/history_long.txt?reposted_at=2015-09-8
======
DanBC
See also the Trojan Room Coffee Pot.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Room_coffee_pot](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Room_coffee_pot)

> The Trojan Room coffee pot was the inspiration for the world's first webcam.
> The coffee pot was located in the corridor just outside the so-called Trojan
> Room within the old Computer Laboratory of the University of Cambridge. The
> webcam was created to help people working in other parts of the building
> avoid pointless trips to the coffee pot by providing, on the user's desktop
> computer, a live 128×128 greyscale picture of the state of the coffee
> pot.[1][2]

This was from 1991.

This is briefly mentioned in the list of other machines on the Internet.

~~~
Vexs
I love how many great innovations and inventions have come about by people
being slightly inconvenienced.

~~~
WalterBright
Automatic valves on steam engines were invented by a boy whose job was to run
up and down a ladder turning valves on an engine designed to pump water from
mines. He attached a pole to the output of the engine to do it for him, and
took a nap.

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threeio
I remember RIT having one.. That was the mid 90s and it had been around for a
while..

[https://www.rit.edu/news/umag/spring2009/03_computer_soda_ma...](https://www.rit.edu/news/umag/spring2009/03_computer_soda_machine.php)

~~~
lyinsteve
I'm a Computer Science House member -- Drink is still a staple of our
organization! Where else can you get Jolt on campus?

Also we've since made an awesome web app and iOS app for dropping drinks.

~~~
yebyen
I clicked this post to say that. I am a CSH alum and the Drink machine steve
describes here has been around for hundreds of years, easily.

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dang
Also [https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~coke/](https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~coke/),
[https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~coke/history_short.txt](https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~coke/history_short.txt),
and
[https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~coke/coke.history.txt](https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~coke/coke.history.txt).
It's amusing that the third one is labeled "recent history" even though it's
from 1990. When you're a coke machine from the 70s you view time somewhat
differently I suppose.

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arkem
Around the same time the University of Western Australia's computer club had
an internet connected coke machine:
[https://www.ucc.asn.au/services/drink.ucc](https://www.ucc.asn.au/services/drink.ucc)

~~~
Frqy3
The coke machine and learning the Dvorak keyboard in the UCC. Fun times.

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kbar13
uiuc's acm soda machine:

[http://www.iana.org/assignments/service-names-port-
numbers/s...](http://www.iana.org/assignments/service-names-port-
numbers/service-names-port-numbers.xhtml?search=6969)

~~~
Qworg
Caffeine! That was the SIGBOT project for 2001 Engineering Open House - it has
had a lot of extra work and upgrades since then. =)

I barely avoided having some sort of terrible lung problems after sanding off
the baked on paint from the 1970's Dr. Pepper machine it once was.

~~~
avuserow
Sadly, the old Dr. Pepper machine bit the dust around Spring 2010. It decided
to freeze sodas more often than we liked, so we replaced it with a Coke
machine in Fall 2010. It was a pain in the ass to get into Siebel, but it
provided a nice capacity upgrade, and we no longer needed to do any tricks
when loading to prevent the first few cans from exploding. The story I heard
was that the original machine was meant for steel cans, so aluminum ones could
explode when being loaded if not loaded gently.

~~~
Qworg
Ah, damn. A decade long run isn't bad.

Yeah, we had to load gently, and the thermocouple probably needed to be
replaced (if you were exploding cans). The coldest soda in the university
though. =)

Yes - it was meant for steel cans. The mechanism at the bottom to output cans
was literally an open pair of scissors driven by a giant 120V solenoid.

~~~
avuserow
The only time we exploded cans was by freezing or loading incorrectly.
Occasionally we had the solenoids fail to fire, but that was solved easily by
sshing into the soda machine and asking it to vend again.

When I was there, the machine controlling the soda machine was a Linux box
running some old Debian with a 2.4 kernel, on VIA or some non-Intel/AMD x86
processor, booting from iSCSI. Thankfully, it was upgraded when the machine
was rebuilt. How much of this was around in your time there?

Nice work with it. Definitely a staple of the ACM office :)

edit: also, it survived a building move, so that's pretty awesome.

~~~
Qworg
We had some random x86, running Linux, in there on a full sized motherboard.
It lived in between the front face and the actual refrigeration compartment.
We also had a fun little perfboard of 120V relays inside of a clear plastic
case we built - the most dangerous part of the machine (which melted down at
least once in the first build).

Man, memories. =)

~~~
klange
When avuserow says "upgraded" he means we "replaced it with a not-much-newer
HP desktop running Ubuntu", so it's still a random x86, running Linux, on a
full-sized motherboard. It lives outside the case these days, though.

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augustocallejas
Caltech used to have a Coke machine that was Internet accessible in the late
90s, but I guess it didn't survive:

[http://www.anderbergfamily.net/ant/machines/](http://www.anderbergfamily.net/ant/machines/)

~~~
DalekBaldwin
It was largely designed by Bret Victor while he was an undergraduate. It had
its own operating system! You can find the documentation here:
[https://web.archive.org/web/20080229205618/http://www.cs.cal...](https://web.archive.org/web/20080229205618/http://www.cs.caltech.edu/~bret/coke/)

The vending machine would occasionally be replaced so students had to create
new hacks from scratch, but none of them were nearly as impressive as that
one. During my undergrad, its only feature was a "random soda" button. More
recently, it had a space cut out of the front panel which housed a flatscreen
monitor so you could surf the web on it while eating your lunch, but nothing
was hooked up to the vending machine's control system.

I guess we were more inventive before we had the modern internet.

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ARothfusz
Any way to find out how many machines had this capability? I don't think the
universities were installing the monitoring hardware, just tapping into them.
I seem to remember one on the UF campus in the early 90's.

~~~
antsar
In this case, it sounds like they _were_ installing the monitoring hardware.

> They installed micro-switches 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.

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acomjean
cute and probably great prior art for any "Internet of things" patents that
show up.

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yellowbkpk
One of my first memories of being on the Internet was visiting Yahoo's
"Devices Connected To The Internet" category every day and checking every one
of them out. In addition to the coffee pots and soda machines mentioned in the
comments here, I spent a lot of time on USC's Telegarden project:

[http://www.usc.edu/dept/garden/](http://www.usc.edu/dept/garden/)

~~~
jbuzbee
Yahoo's list was my inspiration to put The World's First Internet Connected
Bat House on the Internet back in '95 (20 years? Wow!). It was a big day for
me when I made Yahoo's list

The page is still online, with that '95 look but it's been many years since
it's been touched.

[http://batbox.org/](http://batbox.org/)

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roymurdock
This "autobiography" popped up yesterday in a thread about the general
silliness of some consumer-facing IoT devices. The original comment was
written by netcan and includes a great Douglas Adams quote:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10182204](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10182204)

CMS' coke machine is the grandfather of today's IoT devices.

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sk5t
I seem to recall there was a connected candy / M&M machine at CMU around that
time also... anyone have the details?

~~~
coldpie
Did you... did you read the article?

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tanglesome
An oldie, but a goodie.

