In this case, it sounds like they were installing the monitoring hardware. > They installed micro-switches in the Coke machine to sense how many bottles were

In this case, it sounds like they were installing the monitoring hardware. > They installed micro-switches in the Coke machine to sense how many bottles were present in each of its six columns of bottles. The switches were hooked up to CMUA, the PDP-10 that was then the main departmental computer. A server program was written to keep tabs on the Coke machine's state, including how long each bottle had been in the machine.