caserta@athena.mit.edu (Francesco Caserta) (04/04/91)
The Department of Atmospheric Sciences, University of Washington
provides the following service, and also unusual application of finger.
Do you know of any other unusual application of finger?
(RFC742, RFC1194 and RFC1196)
finger [...]@stormy.atmos.washington.edu
[stormy.atmos.washington.edu]
Format: finger weather[-station[-type[-day]]e.g.: finger weather-SEA-zone
where: station = station for required area or hiway (default=SEA)
type = disc, zone, warn, extend (default=zone)
day = day of month forecast was issued (default=today)
Washington SEA Seattle
Oregon PDX Portland
Northern and central California SFO San Francisco
Southern California LAX Los Angeles
Hawaii HNL Honolulu
Nevada RNO Reno
Idaho BOI Boise
Montana GTF Great Falls
Wyoming CYS Cheyenne
Utah SLC Salt Lake City
Arizona PHX Phoenix
Colorado DEN Denver
New Mexico ABQ Albuquerque
North Dakota BIS Bismark
South Dakota FSD Sioux Falls
Nebraska OMA Omaha
Kansas TOP Topeka
Oklahoma OKC Oklahoma City
Western Texas LBB Lubbock
Northern Texas FTW Fort Worth
Southern Texas SAT San Antonio
Minnesota MSP Minneapolis
Iowa DSM Des Moines
Missouri STL St. Louis
Arkansas LIT Little Rock
Louisiana NEW New Orleans
Mississippi JAN Jackson
Wisconsin MKE Milwaukee
Michigan ARB Ann Arbor
Illinois CHI Chicago
Indiana IND Indianapolis
Ohio CLE Cleveland
Kentucky SDF Louisville
Tennessee MEM Memphis
Alabama and northwest Florida BHM Birmingham
Georgia ATL Atlanta
Florida (except northwest) MIA Miami
South Carolina CAE Columbia
North Carolina RDU Raleigh
Virginia RIC (issued by WBC)
West Virginia CRW Charleston
DC and vicinity WBC Washington
Western Pennsyvania PIT Pittsburgh
Eastern Pennsyvania PHL Philadelphia
Western New York BUF Buffalo
Interior eastern New York ALB Albany
S.E. New York and N. New Jersey NYC New York City
Southern New England states BOS Boston
Vermont BTV (issued by ALB)
New Hampshire CON (issued by PWM)
Maine PWM Portland
Francesco Casertacaserta@athena.mit.edu (Francesco Caserta) (04/04/91)
The Department of Atmospheric Sciences, University of Washington
provides the following service, and also unusual application of finger.
Do you know of any other unusual application of finger?
(RFC742, RFC1194 and RFC1196)
finger [...]@stormy.atmos.washington.edu
[stormy.atmos.washington.edu]
Format: finger weather[-station[-type[-day]]e.g.: finger weather-SEA-zone
where: station = station for required area or hiway (default=SEA)
type = disc, zone, warn, extend (default=zone)
day = day of month forecast was issued (default=today)
Washington SEA Seattle
Oregon PDX Portland
Northern and central California SFO San Francisco
Southern California LAX Los Angeles
Hawaii HNL Honolulu
Nevada RNO Reno
Idaho BOI Boise
Montana GTF Great Falls
Wyoming CYS Cheyenne
Utah SLC Salt Lake City
Arizona PHX Phoenix
Colorado DEN Denver
New Mexico ABQ Albuquerque
North Dakota BIS Bismark
South Dakota FSD Sioux Falls
Nebraska OMA Omaha
Kansas TOP Topeka
Oklahoma OKC Oklahoma City
Western Texas LBB Lubbock
Northern Texas FTW Fort Worth
Southern Texas SAT San Antonio
Minnesota MSP Minneapolis
Iowa DSM Des Moines
Missouri STL St. Louis
Arkansas LIT Little Rock
Louisiana NEW New Orleans
Mississippi JAN Jackson
Wisconsin MKE Milwaukee
Michigan ARB Ann Arbor
Illinois CHI Chicago
Indiana IND Indianapolis
Ohio CLE Cleveland
Kentucky SDF Louisville
Tennessee MEM Memphis
Alabama and northwest Florida BHM Birmingham
Georgia ATL Atlanta
Florida (except northwest) MIA Miami
South Carolina CAE Columbia
North Carolina RDU Raleigh
Virginia RIC (issued by WBC)
West Virginia CRW Charleston
DC and vicinity WBC Washington
Western Pennsyvania PIT Pittsburgh
Eastern Pennsyvania PHL Philadelphia
Western New York BUF Buffalo
Interior eastern New York ALB Albany
S.E. New York and N. New Jersey NYC New York City
Southern New England states BOS Boston
Vermont BTV (issued by ALB)
New Hampshire CON (issued by PWM)
Maine PWM Portland
Francesco Casertametzger@watson.ibm.com (Perry E. Metzger) (04/05/91)
In article <1991Apr4.031506.6778@athena.mit.edu> caserta@athena.mit.edu (Francesco Caserta) writes: >The Department of Atmospheric Sciences, University of Washington >provides the following service, and also unusual application of finger. >Do you know of any other unusual application of finger? The RFC for finger specifies fingers behavior when applied to coke machines. It is my understanding that CMU used to have a coke machine on the internet that followed the stated behavior, although this may be an urban legend. Perry Metzger
rsk@hazel.circ.upenn.edu (Rick Kulawiec) (04/05/91)
In article <1991Apr4.182115.3531@watson.ibm.com> metzger@watson.ibm.com (Perry E. Metzger) writes: >The RFC for finger specifies fingers behavior when applied to coke >machines. It is my understanding that CMU used to have a coke machine >on the internet that followed the stated behavior, although this may >be an urban legend. I think it was for real...the three notes below cover the story, and are probably worth reposting here since it's been a while since they first appeared. ---Rsk Originally-From: tgl@zog.cs.cmu.edu (Tom Lane) Original-Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Original-Subject: The only Coke machine on the Internet Original-Date: 11 Dec 89 15:45:34 GMT This story is old news to ex-CMU folk, but may be amusing to others. 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 microswitches 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... As far as I know nothing similar has been done elsewhere, so CMU can legitimately boast of having the only Coke machine on the Internet. 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 nonreturnable, 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 machine. I'm a little fuzzy about the dates, but I believe all the other details are accurate. The man page for the second-generation (Unix) Coke programs credits the hardware work to John Zsarnay, the software to David Nichols and Ivor Durham. I don't recall who did the original PDP-10 programs. tom lane ========== Orginally-From: sgw@cad.cs.cmu.edu (Stephen Wadlow) Orginal-Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Orginal-Subject: Re: The only Coke machine on the Internet Orginal-Date: 11 Dec 89 20:26:30 GMT In article <7295@pt.cs.cmu.edu> tgl@zog.cs.cmu.edu (Tom Lane) writes: >This story is old news to ex-CMU folk, but may be amusing to others. [story of the CMU coke machine] At the annual Jimmy Tsang's dinner expedition last saturday, I was talking with a member of the CS Facilities staff [Hi Steve :-)] who is currently working on the new hardware for the coke server. In addition to monitoring the status of the coke machine, the new server will re-implement the JF (junk food) protocol, telling you the status of the CS M&M dispenser and other CS-affiliated junk food dispensers. It's hoped that this will all be finished and installed by early next year, such that any internet site will be able to finger coke@cs.cmu.edu once again. An addendum to the coke story is that for quite sometime there was a Perq sitting behind a large glass window in front of the elevators on the third floor of science hall that frequently ran a variation of the coke program that would display bar graphs indicating the amount of time since the machine had been filled. You now didn't even have to be logged in to find out if the coke was cold, rather you could just be riding by on the elevator and decide on the fly if you wanted to grab a cold coke. You used to (and still may) be able to finger weather@hermes.ai.mit.edu to find out what the weather was like on the 9th floor of tech square (the ai labs). steve ========== Originally-From: colbath@cs.rochester.edu (Sean Colbath) Original-Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers Original-Subject: Re: The only Coke machine on the Internet Original-Date: 11 Dec 89 19:01:21 GMT I don't think the students at RIT (Rochester Institute of Technology) get this newsgroup, so I'll relate this (true) story. At UR, there is an organization known as the Computer Interest Floor, an area of campus housing where computer oriented people can get together. RIT has a similar organization, known as CSH (Computer Science House, or...). Many of their members are quite hardware oriented. Well, apparently they found an old slightly malfunctioning coke machine that was being thrown out (can-style). They decided to install this on their hall, but were informed by the powers that be that the university had granted a monopoly on vending machines to a city vending machine service, and they couldn't set it up. So, they decided to come up with a way to get around this rule: they changed the coke machine from a vending machine to a peripheral! The vending machine has a serial line running from it to one of the unix systems. It looks much like a regular machine, except it has a red calculator-like display that says "Coke" on it. If you press a button, it'll tell you how many sodas are in that particular bin, or "Empty". Next to it is a terminal with the time of day displayed, and a coke logo. To buy a coke, all you have to do is to "log on" to your coke machine account at the terminal, look at the status report, and "buy" your coke by selecting from a menu. Each user had a bank account that was added to by giving the machine maintainers more money. Now, this isn't all -- you could buy your coke from any terminal in their housing section (every room had one, and they had two semi-public terminal areas. If you wanted to, you could program in a delay before the machine dropped your coke, so you wouldn't get down the hall to find someone had snarfed your coke. Apparently they wanted coke to come do a commercial showing someone hacking on a terminal, pausing with a thirsty look on their face, type "coke", race down the hallway, and arrive just in time to have the machine plop a soda in their hand...! Sean Colbath colbath@cs.rochester.edu ...uunet!rochester!colbath
romkey@ASYLUM.SF.CA.US (John Romkey) (04/05/91)
Date: 4 Apr 91 18:21:15 GMT From: decwrl!uunet.uu.net!bywater!arnor!halley!metzger (Perry E. Metzger) The RFC for finger specifies fingers behavior when applied to coke machines. It is my understanding that CMU used to have a coke machine on the internet that followed the stated behavior, although this may be an urban legend. No, it's true. CMU did have a coke machine on the Internet. - john romkey Epilogue Technology USENET/UUCP/Internet: romkey@asylum.sf.ca.us voice/fax: 415 594-1141
CSP1DWD@MVS.OAC.UCLA.EDU (Denis DeLaRoca 825-4580, 213) (04/05/91)
Alas, the weather finger service at <stormy.atmos.washington.edu> is not more, it's been replaced by an equivalent RPC-based service. The RPC-client source code can be obtained by fingering "weather" at the above host. -- Denis
smith@newsserver.sfu.ca (Richard Smith) (04/05/91)
Here is what fingering "coke" will get you now: [cs.cmu.edu] [ Forwarding coke as "gripe@vega.fac.cs.cmu.edu" ] [VEGA.FAC.CS.CMU.EDU] Login name: gripe In real life: Gripe Directory: /usr1/gripe Shell: /usr/cs/bin/csh Last login Tue Mar 5 10:22 on ttyP7 from GLN.FAC.CS.CMU.EDU Mail came on Fri Apr 5 09:57, last read on Fri Apr 5 09:01 Plan: CS/RI User Services Software and hardware requests, bug reports and fixes, general questions about the facility -- all of these can be sent to "gripe". Gripe mail is *NOT* constantly monitored. If you have a problem which requires immediate attention, please call the CS Operator (x2607).
smith@newsserver.sfu.ca (Richard Smith) (04/06/91)
"weather" is now a RPC which will produce similar results (i.e. the weather for your locality - if you live in the U.S :->). I downloaded it and tried it - it works. ...r
hollings@poona.cs.wisc.edu (Jeff Hollingsworth) (04/06/91)
|> |> As far as I know nothing similar has been done elsewhere, so CMU can |> legitimately boast of having the only Coke machine on the Internet. |> Here at the University of Wisconsin we were *FORCED* to computerize our Coke machine a year ago (or they would take it away). The University had given an exclusive vending contract to a local vending company. That company didn't like the fact we were under cutting their prices. But they did permit "coffee clubs" to continue. The idea was people would pay into a club and then only people who payed in could take coffee from the pot. We decided to do the same thing with our Coke machine. A small bit of hardware was built to activiate the Coke machine via a computer, and a program was written to track coke accounts and keep their balances. The coke machine was also modified so that it would NOT take money and could only be activated from the computer. So I guess Wisconsin can claim the only Coke machine that can be controlled via the Internet. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Jeff Hollingsworth Work: (608) 262-6617 Internet: hollings@cs.wisc.edu Home: (608) 256-4839 X.400: <pn=Jeff.Hollingsworth;ou=cs;o=uw-madison;prmd=xnren;c=US>
hollings@poona.cs.wisc.edu (Jeff Hollingsworth) (04/06/91)
!> !> As far as I know nothing similar has been done elsewhere, so CMU can !> legitimately boast of having the only Coke machine on the Internet. Here at the University of Wisconsin we were *FORCED* to computerize our Coke machine a year ago (or they would take it away). The universion had given an exclusive vending contract to a local vending company. But they did prmit "coffee clubs" to continue. The idea is that people pay into a club and then only people in the club get to drink from the coffee. We decided to do the same thing with our Coke machine. A small bit of hardware was built to activate the Coke machine via a computer, and a program was written to track coke accounts and keep their balances. The coke machine was also modified so that it would NOT take money and could only be activated from the computer. So I guess Wisconsin can claim the only Coke machine that can be controlled via the Internet. -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Jeff Hollingsworth Work: (608) 262-6617 Internet: hollings@cs.wisc.edu Home: (608) 256-4839 X.400: <pn=Jeff.Hollingsworth;ou=cs;o=uw-madison;prmd=xnren;c=US>
Rudy.Nedved@RUDY.FAC.CS.CMU.EDU (04/06/91)
John, You know your stuff. CMU still has a coke machine on the network. Alas because of software upgrades being constant that little trick has been divorced from the finger software. Under finger we had coke machine status and "tingle" status... At the current time we have network service for the coke machine and for our M&M machine. We have this under the "junk food" service. -Rudy
barmar@think.com (Barry Margolin) (04/07/91)
In article <1991Apr5.192823.400@spool.cs.wisc.edu> hollings@poona.cs.wisc.edu (Jeff Hollingsworth) writes: >So I guess Wisconsin can claim the only Coke machine that can be controlled >via the Internet. Sorry, but Thinking Machines has had its Coke machine on the Internet for at least five years. If you telnet to Coke5.Think.COM, each character you type is as if a nickel were dropped into the slot. The subnet Coke5 is on a subnet to which we don't allow telnet from the outside world, so you won't have much luck trying this. But it works in-house. There's a terminal sitting next to the machine, and users can type their name, get their drink, and then the price is deducted from their paycheck (we also use the payroll deduction system for lunch and the postage meter). -- Barry Margolin, Thinking Machines Corp. barmar@think.com {uunet,harvard}!think!barmar
les@GANG-OF-FOUR.STANFORD.EDU (Les Earnest) (04/10/91)
>> As far as I know nothing similar has been done elsewhere, so CMU can >> legitimately boast of having the only Coke machine on the Internet. > > Here at the University of Wisconsin we were *FORCED* to computerize our Coke > machine a year ago (or they would take it away). . . . > The coke machine was also modified so > that it would NOT take money and could only be activated from the computer. > So I guess Wisconsin can claim the only Coke machine that can be controlled > via the Internet. A vending machine was connected to the SAIL computer at Stanford around 1973, which I believe was much earlier than any other computer- controlled vending machine. It sold snacks, soft drinks, and beer. Everything could be purchased for cash or credit except the beer, which could only be bought on credit and then only if the buyer was over 21. Any attempt by an underage person to buy beer elicited the error message "Sorry, kid." The national wire services ran a story on this machine at the time and some representatives of one of the major vending machine manufacturers came to see if they could turn it into a product. They were apparently deterred by the fact that they didn't understand diddly about computers. They also were put off by the fact that the computer being used for this modest task (a large DEC 10) cost about $1 million. SAIL was one of the earliest systems on ARPAnet and, for no good reason, has been recording both its machine room temperature and the outside air temperature at 10 minute intervals for the last 20 years. SAIL and its vending machine are still in use today at the Computer Science Department at Stanford, but they will soon part company -- SAIL is scheduled to die on June 6, its 25th birthday. It has lived a rather full life as computers go. -Les Earnest (Les@SAIL.Stanford.edu)
guy@auspex.auspex.com (Guy Harris) (04/10/91)
>The RFC for finger specifies fingers behavior when applied to coke >machines. It is my understanding that CMU used to have a coke machine >on the internet that followed the stated behavior, although this may >be an urban legend. Well, the specified behavior is: 2.5.5. Vending machines Vending machines SHOULD respond to a {C} request with a list of all items currently available for purchase and possible consumption. Vending machines SHOULD respond to a {U}{C} request with a detailed count or list of the particular product or product slot. Vending machines should NEVER NEVER EVER eat requests. Or money. When last I tried fingering CMU's Coke machine, several years ago, it did report the status of the Cokes - or, at least, what I received back was a report that purported to be the status of the Cokes in the machine. I don't know if that was a *real* status report or not; I also don't know if the machine in question ever ate money.
barryf@aix01.aix.rpi.edu (Barry B. Floyd) (04/12/91)
Is anyone archiving this thread of postings (interesting devices attached to networks)? I am interested in receiving the archive when this discussion dies down. respond directly to me or post to the group. -- +--------------------------------------------------------------------+ | Barry B. Floyd \\\ barry_floyd@mts.rpi.edu | | Manager Information Systems - HR \\\ usere9w9@rpitsmts | +-Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute--------------------troy, ny 12180-+
brendan@cs.widener.edu (Brendan Kehoe) (04/22/91)
In <1991Apr21.205237.24332@mnemosyne.cs.du.edu>, caserta@athena.mit.edu writes: >The Department of Atmospheric Sciences, University of Washington >provides the following service, and also unusual application of finger. >Do you know of any other unusual application of finger? NO, they do NOT anymore. The company they get the information from has it in their contract that the information can't be redistributed. (Without a $150 fee, but that's not applicable. They have to keep it on the UofW campus.) -- Brendan Kehoe - Widener Sun Network Manager - brendan@cs.widener.edu Widener University in Chester, PA A Bloody Sun-Dec War Zone "Does this person look relaxed to you? Well, it's actually an experiment of Contour's new 565-E chair!"