In this case, it sounds like they <i>were</i> installing the monitoring hardware.<p>&gt; 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&#x27;s state, including how long each bottle had been in
 the machine.