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.
> 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.