caserta@athena.mit.edu (Francesco Caserta) (04/05/91)
Poiche' il mio posting su finger weather ha suscitato tanto scalpore, continuo la serie. Questa e' ancora meglio e la devo a Rick Kulawiec al Cardiothoracic Imaging Research Center a U. Penn. Sono delle copie di vecchi documenti apparsi su usenet che raccontano del primo insolito uso di finger. (N.B. finger coke@cs.cmu.edu esiste ancora, perche' era tanto famoso che non hanno avuto il coraggio di eleminarlo. Pero' adesso ha una funzione diversa.) Buon divertimento! Francesco Caserta (caserta@math.mit.edu) =========================================================================== 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