🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <2...@ns-mx.uiowa.edu> jo...@pyrite.cs.uiowa.edu (Douglas W. Jones,201H MLH,3193350740,3193382879) writes:
>>From article <72...@pt.cs.cmu.edu>, by t...@zog.cs.cmu.edu (Tom Lane):
>> 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.
>
>The coke machine existed in the fall of 1969, back when the computer
>center was on an upper floor of Scaife (I think that's the spelling) hall.
>It was the most unusual coke machine I've ever patronized.  The machine was
>cobbled together looking, but it looked like a coke machine.  The odd thing
>was that the coin slot was on the other side of the hall, installed in a
>locker.  Presumably, the wires from the coin slot to the machine went
>under the floor, but there were rumors that the machine was interfaced to
>the Univac 1108 somehow. [No, they weren't. -EW13]

That was a different Coke machine, I believe run by Roy Weil.  In 1968 when I
showed up, the coin slot was in a locker next to the machine.  (In order to
fit it into a hole in the wall, the machine's shell had to be removed.)  When
the Comp. Center installed card reader for WATFOR jobs, the locker with the
coin changer was removed, so it had to be installed across the hall.  A sign
went up saying "Insert money across the hall", and graffiti immediately was
added saying where to get the bottle, where to open it, return it, etc.

The Cs engineering lab was in Porter Hall when Jim Teter ran his machine.  He
got a second one when Science Hall opened (Is that Stever Hall now?).  They
paid a substantial portion of his tuition.  His Porter Hall machine had five
columns of Coke and one that varied.  We could tell which grad student was
burning the most midnight oil by seeing which column was lowest, so I learned
to use the least recently used column (the LRU algortihm).  That was the
coldest and most often produced Cokes that began to freeze upon opening.

I left in 1974, before the machines got hooked to the computer.  Thanks for
that info.

		- Eric Werme (EW13) [Appropriate - I was born on Friday 13th!]
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