[ih] Early IoT: anyone remember The Internet Toaster and Crane? :D

[Clem Cole]

Yep - $.25 for a cold glass-bottled 12 oz coke.   It could not be beaten.
And 'coke stat' was extremely important if you were working any of the labs
in the EE bldg, which was next door (and then outside.   Today, it's
connected via a tunnel).

Missing from the story is that the exit door to the 3rd-floor CS terminal
room was about 20 ft away from the coke machine, hung off a corridor, as
part of the main machine room.  Because the cooling systems for everything
were on a common air supply, so all the doors automatically closed and may
even have had a timed alarm at some point but I have forgotten.   The key
point was that you could do "coke stat;" decide it was cold enough,
then exit out the back door, get a coke, and return via that door in one
"coke dispense cycle," but not two before it automatically closed and
locked.   Otherwise, you had to walk back to the end of the hall and enter
the machine room via the door lock protocol, and then cross back to the
terminal room.

On Thu, Jul 9, 2020 at 8:20 AM Lars Brinkhoff via Internet-history <
internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> Jorge Amodio wrote:
> > As far as I remember there was a wired coke machine at MIT
>
> I think that was CMU.
> https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~coke/history_long.txt
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