The “Only” Coke Machine on the Internet (1998) | Hacker News Reader

The “Only” Coke Machine on the Internet (1998)

cs.cmu.edu

79 pointsgkop34 comments

See also the 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.

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

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.

Pretty much the reason I first learnt to code :)

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...

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.

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.

Also https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~coke/, https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~coke/history_short.txt, and 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.

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

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

uiuc's acm soda machine:

http://www.iana.org/assignments/service-names-port-numbers/s...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. =)

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.

Does the coke machine take the swipes from the i-card(I think that's what the id cards are called) like the old one?

It does, and feeds into the same stats database. Unfortunately I can't seem to get to caffeine.acm. I'm unsure how that works these days, since a lot of things were redesigned after I left (including retiring AFS).

When I left in 2011, there was a card reader and a touch screen, so you swiped your card, and then selected your choice on the screen. I think it may have also had a random button at one time or another. The intention was to eventually wire up the physical buttons once again to work closer to a regular soda machine.

For a while, it was wired up to twitter: https://twitter.com/acmsoda

We did have some special "admin" cards for correcting misvends, typically someone's library card or something similar.

We had the physical buttons wired up and replaced the touchscreen with a larger (non-touch) LCD panel circa late 2011. We wanted to get some LCD modules to replace the empty panels next to the buttons, but I don't know if they were ever wired up (I know we built them, but I recall there being a major blocking problem).

I'm amazed the thing kept tweeting a year after I graduated.

the port number was a gag, also used to illustrate sessions we did on assigned-numbers and service discovery.

We did use it for various mechmania sessions as the game communication port. During my time, we also had a running joke that in our "spare time", we would implement a telnet server so you could do maintenance to the soda machine.

Did the soda machine ever use it for anything at all? I never did find a conclusive answer to that.

It did, but it was totally a toy (since it lacked any authentication of its own). We'd occasionally turn it on in the middle of the night and drop a can behind someone hacking away!

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/

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...

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.

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.

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.

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

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/

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/

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

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

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

Did you... did you read the article?

An oldie, but a goodie.

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