You're probably thinking of 'The "Only" Coke Machine on the Internet'

https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~coke/history_long.txt

I was at CMU '83 to '87. It saved us time to check if there was the proper kind of coke in the machine and if it was cold before we walked down to the room with the machine. It was cheaper than the University's vending machines. And it was in classy glass bottles.

Trivia: It was (I was told) using experimental 3Mbps Ethernet, the predecessor to the 10Mbps Ethernet that has grown to 10Gpbs+ now.

I forward this discussion to my sons saying that there is a story about coke machine. Here you go. Thanks.

Considering we actually have internet connected teapots now, I wonder if any mass market products have implemented this.

It's always been my dream to build one. Now that we have things like Raspberry Pi zero W, I want to hack up my Kuerig and make that internet connected

IIRC Ultimaker 3D printers do implement this

Nope, they recently removed that status code.

Only from clients supporting HTTP only. Note that RFC 2324 [0] defines the Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol or HTCPCP, which is an extension of HTTP and implementors of clients for this are free to return 418 if necessary. Also, RFC 7168 [1] which extends the protocol as HTCPCP-TEA now fully supports teapots, and is probably a better choice for modern clients. Also of interest is the SNMP MIB for remote management of 'Drip-Type Heated Beverage Hardware' which is defined in RFC 2325 [2] although this does not appear to have been updated with teapot, samovar, urn or other non-filter-coffee management data...

Implementing tea making device remote management would probably be a good candidate for a GSoC project or even a startup if you can find a VC gullible enough to fund you!

0. https://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2324.txt

1. https://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc7168.txt

2. https://tools.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2325.txt

From the spec. Teapots or any other devices are free to send it anyway

Which is actually used in a few places. Google always return it from https://www.google.com/teapot, and Binance uses that status code if you've been IP-banned for exceeding rate limits.

I've worked on several big SaaS platforms, and all of them have at least one easter egg in there that returns teapot ;-)

Mandatory reading:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17175960

npm implemented it in their server last year!

Our team got hit by that issue. I slapped by head when I saw the error code, having come across it before. How am I meant to debug something that's literally a joke and isn't meant to be used in production :(

Yes.

Still remember the day 30+years ago using my 2400 baud to connect to internet and discovered FYI articles and the zen of internet.

Much better than reading ICL and IBM manual (red book ok but no fun) I supposed and debug 370 assembler Abend code etc.

finger

I wonder if someone fill the column and it is not empty say 1 bottle left. Then it is still not cold if someone else got say the 2nd one. Any source code available to check :-)

haha.. those were the days.. where you would get someone's resume over finger :)