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

[vinton cerf]

thanks for that lovely historical summary, Geoff.

The Elvish script was the Tengwar.

The Prancing Pony was also stocked with fresh Chinese food. I can't
remember whether it was from Chef Chu's or one of the restaurants in the
Town and Country Shopping Center. I think it was the latter because one of
the students did part time work at the restaurant and kept the Prancing
Pony stocked.

v


v


On Thu, Jul 9, 2020 at 4:46 PM the keyboard of geoff goodfellow via
Internet-history <internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:

> vis-a-vis "Stanford AI Lab had a vending machine for food and other stuff
> and it knew
> whether you were old enough for alcoholic beverages..."
>
> yours truly recalls the SAIL vending machine was connected to the labs
> PDP-10 via an RS-232 line.  The vending machine customers used a model 33
> Teletype next to it that was later replaced by a Lear Siegler ADM CRT
> display terminal... more details from Les Earnest in this EXCERPT at
> https://web.stanford.edu/~learnest/spin/sagas.htm:
>
> *Prancing Pony vending machine*
>
> The Prancing Pony Vending Machine was evidently the first computer
> controlled vending machine anywhere in the world. It was created to fill an
> unmet need.
>
>
>
> Given that SAIL was about five miles off-campus and the nearest food source
> was a beer garden (Zotts) about a mile away, I initially set up a coffee
> and food room near the center of our facility and it subsequently got named
> after a pub in Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings". In fact all rooms in our
> facility were named after places in Middle Earth and had signs posted on
> the doors showing their names in both Latin and Elvish alphabets. At some
> point the Stanford Buildings folks asked me to number our rooms and give
> them a map. Instead we gave them a map showing room names in both
> alphabets. Their response was to send out a carpenter with numbered tags,
> which he nailed on each door.
>
> Meanwhile we took turns buying coffee and food, which was offered for sale
> on an honor system basis. That worked well for awhile but it suddenly
> started losing money big time. We then negotiated with Canteen, which had
> an exclusive contract with Stanford, to put in a couple of vending
> machines. However we found that they were not restocked often enough and
> broke rather frequently.
>
> I finally negotiated to rent a machine from Canteen that we could restock.
> They seemed to like this idea since it would relieve them of making
> frequent trips out to our distant facility. In fact they never billed us
> for the rental even though I repeatedly called it to their attention.
> Meanwhile I got Ted Panofsky to make a connection to our computer so that
> it could release the doors on the vending machine, thus making it possible
> to buy either for cash or, though a computer terminal, on credit. I then
> wrote a program that let people buy under password control and that billed
> them on a monthly basis via email. It was set up to randomly give away
> whatever was purchased on 1/128th of the purchases and offered a "double or
> nothing" option, which had an honest 50:50 outcome. I noticed a cultural
> difference in that almost none of the computer science students gambled,
> knowing that they would win 1/128th of the time if they didn't, whereas
> many of the music students did gamble. In both cases the Prancing Pony
> vending machine, having taken on the name of the room, seemed quite popular
> and we organized a team of volunteers to acquire the needed supplies and
> restock the machine at least twice a day.
>
>
>
> The Prancing Pony also sold beer but only on credit and only to people over
> 21, since it knew everyone’s age. If a youngster attempted to buy beer it
> responded “Sorry, kid.”
>
> Some years later I found out why the honor system had failed in the Pony. I
> was the founding President of Imagen Corp., which made the first desktop
> publishing systems using laser printers, and after awhile there a young
> woman employee felt obligated to confess that when she was a teenybopper,
> she and her girlfriends used to ride their horses up to SAIL, then went in
> and stole candy from the Prancing Pony. Thus, her misconduct contributed to
> a technological advancement.
>
> On Thu, Jul 9, 2020 at 3:05 AM *Vint Cerf via Internet-history
> <internet-history at elists.isoc.org <internet-history at elists.isoc.org>>
> wrote:*
>
> > Stanford AI Lab had a vending machine for food and other stuff and it
> knew
> > whether you were old enough for alcoholic beverages...
> >
> > v
> >
> >
> > On Thu, Jul 9, 2020 at 8:18 AM Jorge Amodio via Internet-history <
> > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> >
> > > As far as I remember there was a wired coke machine at MIT
> > >
> > > Jorge
> > >
> > >
> > > On Thu, Jul 9, 2020 at 3:05 AM Lars Brinkhoff via Internet-history <
> > > internet-history at elists.isoc.org> wrote:
> > >
> > > > How about Arpanet of Things?
> > > >
> > > > Danny Hillis connected elevator buttons to MIT's Chaosnet, and by
> > > > extension Arpanet.  Users could type a special key combination on
> their
> > > > keyboards to call the elevator to Tech Square floors 8 or 9.  Another
> > > > key would buzz open the door to the machine room on the 9th floor.
> > > > Source code for this is available.
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> Geoff.Goodfellow at iconia.com
> living as The Truth is True
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