Also applies to
nerds:
"Hey wouln't it be
cool if we could
finger a
coke machine to see if it's got
coke?"
The first
fingerable coke machine has been attributed to both
MIT and
Carnegie Mellon; I tend to side with CMU, based on what I have seen online. One could "finger coke@server"; the
server's
finger daemon was
configured, when asked for
information about the user coke, to return information about each of the slots in the machine -- whether there was coke there, how long it had been there, and whether it was
cold. Needless to say, creative
hackers have extended this concept to other
devices.
"Wouldn't it be cool if we could see, on the web, if the bathrooms were in use? And the laundry machines, too!"
The
nerds in
Random Hall at MIT have fingerable,
web-accessible
bathrooms (no
cameras, you
pervert!),
washing machines, and
dryers.
The bathrooms' status can be viewed at http://bathroom.mit.edu; the Random Hall nerds are, of course, reachable at random-nerds@mit.edu.
(Addendum: I now attend CMU as an undergradute in Computer Science. I have since been assured that CMU bears claim to the original online Coke machine; and while that one is long gone, the grad CS lounge Coke machine has a webcam. Sadly I don't have the URL, or even know if it is web-accessible.)