The “Only” Coke Machine on the Internet (1998)
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Re: The “Only” Coke Machine on the Internet (1998)
#2Caltech used to have a Coke machine that was Internet accessible in the late 90s, but I guess it didn't survive:
Re: The “Only” Coke Machine on the Internet (1998)
#3An oldie, but a goodie.
Re: The “Only” Coke Machine on the Internet (1998)
#4Also 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.
Re: The “Only” Coke Machine on the Internet (1998)
#5Around 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
Re: The “Only” Coke Machine on the Internet (1998)
#6cute and probably great prior art for any "Internet of things" patents that show up.
Re: The “Only” Coke Machine on the Internet (1998)
#7This "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.
Re: The “Only” Coke Machine on the Internet (1998)
#8I 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...
Re: The “Only” Coke Machine on the Internet (1998)
#9Any 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.
Re: The “Only” Coke Machine on the Internet (1998)
#10Any 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.