hn-classics/_stories/1998/10186916.md

---
created_at: '2015-09-08T17:11:59.000Z'
title: The “Only” Coke Machine on the Internet (1998)
url: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~coke/history_long.txt?reposted_at=2015-09-8
author: gkop
points: 79
story_text: 
comment_text: 
num_comments: 34
story_id: 
story_title: 
story_url: 
parent_id: 
created_at_i: 1441732319
_tags:
- story
- author_gkop
- story_10186916
objectID: '10186916'
year: 1998

---
[Source](https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~coke/history_long.txt?reposted_at=2015-09-8 "Permalink to ")

The "Only" Coke Machine on the Internet Hi, I'm the CMU CS Department Coke Machine. A lot of folks have written a quite a bit about me in the last couple of years, and most of them can tell you more about the history of me and my family than I can. Before I worked here, my Mom, and I think her Pop (heh heh :-) used to sell sodas to the folks in the Computer Science Department. In fact, my family has been here longer than most of the students, and even a lot of the faculty. We moved to the third floor of the computer science building (Wean Hall) in the 70's. I still sell Coke in bottles, but they're big 20 oz plastic things these days. They go for 50 cents each, which I guess isn't too bad considering inflation. And at least they don't break inside me any more like the glass ones used to. What a mess... Tom Lane had the following to say about us: > 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 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. 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... (Which is not to say that I haven't had a lot of electronic visits and kind email from folks all over the country and all over the world.) Tom continues: > 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 non-returnable, 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
Tufte CSS, upgrade jekyll, add metadata, index 2018-02-23 18:58:03 +00:00			`---`
			`created_at: '2015-09-08T17:11:59.000Z'`
			`title: The “Only” Coke Machine on the Internet (1998)`
			`url: https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~coke/history_long.txt?reposted_at=2015-09-8`
			`author: gkop`
			`points: 79`
			`story_text:`
			`comment_text:`
			`num_comments: 34`
			`story_id:`
			`story_title:`
			`story_url:`
			`parent_id:`
			`created_at_i: 1441732319`
			`_tags:`
			`- story`
			`- author_gkop`
			`- story_10186916`
			`objectID: '10186916'`
Adds year as metadata to all stories 2018-06-08 12:05:27 +00:00			`year: 1998`
Tufte CSS, upgrade jekyll, add metadata, index 2018-02-23 18:58:03 +00:00
			`---`
Initial commit 2018-02-23 18:19:40 +00:00			`[Source](https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~coke/history_long.txt?reposted_at=2015-09-8 "Permalink to ")`

			The "Only" Coke Machine on the Internet Hi, I'm the CMU CS Department Coke Machine. A lot of folks have written a quite a bit about me in the last couple of years, and most of them can tell you more about the history of me and my family than I can. Before I worked here, my Mom, and I think her Pop (heh heh :-) used to sell sodas to the folks in the Computer Science Department. In fact, my family has been here longer than most of the students, and even a lot of the faculty. We moved to the third floor of the computer science building (Wean Hall) in the 70's. I still sell Coke in bottles, but they're big 20 oz plastic things these days. They go for 50 cents each, which I guess isn't too bad considering inflation. And at least they don't break inside me any more like the glass ones used to. What a mess... Tom Lane had the following to say about us: > 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 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. 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... (Which is not to say that I haven't had a lot of electronic visits and kind email from folks all over the country and all over the world.) Tom continues: > 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 non-returnable, 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