The cs.cmu.edu Coke machine was hooked up to a computer by John Zsarnay and/or Lawrence Butcher (now at Xerox PARC); essentially, the six little out-of-product lights on the pushbuttons were monitored. These would flash on for a couple seconds while a particular bottle was dispensed, and of course stay on when a column was empty. They were connected, I believe, to a terminal server machine that was programmed by Mike Kazar to keep track of the time of the last transition (short-term and long-term) for each column. He and Dave Nichols put together a simple Coke@+(TM) protocol by which any machine on the local University-grant Ethernet, and later the Internet as a whole, could probe the current status of the machine; Dave wrote the program that became the ``coke'' command, which printed out the length of time since each column had been totally empty. (The idea, you see, was to notice when a column, having gone empty, was refilled with (warm, room-temperature) Coke, because in principle you wanted to select the coldest Coke available, and thus avoid those colums that had recently been refilled.