This page gives just a little background information on WebSoda.

The current (and still original) machine was donated by Calderon Vending, and we are very thankful for this donation.

In the winter of the 1999/2000 academic year WebSoda was started by four students (Engle, Eppert, VanVertloo, Pohlman) in Web-Based Information Systems under the direction of Dr. Mike Wollowski. They are responsible for the original interfacing of the soda machine with the web server, as well as the original web application. Their work made the papers, and the article can still be viewed here.

In the winter of 2001/2002 there were issues with the controlling computer and since there were no active student maintainers (they all graduated) WebSoda went offline.

Dateline: Spring 2002. Web-Based Information Systems students Chris Barrell and Rob Signorelli undertook "WebSoda Mk II" (the name I just now made up for purposes of being creative), the project of rejuvenating WebSoda. The machine was completely reloaded and the application data was rewritten using Java Servlet Pages (JSP). In addition to bringing the machine up-to-date it was brought into modern financial markets, too, by accepting PayPal transactions. This allowed WebSoda patrons to digitally transfer funds into the machine, saving the patrons the trouble of getting a sum of money and Mike Wollowski in the same place at the same time.

In November of 2002 there were some minor issues with the machine and Jeremy Barton was asked to take a look at the machine. In addition to fixing the odd bugs that had been discovered some new features were added, such as the ability for users to change their passwords without needing to see Mike Wollowski. Both the parallel interface software and the web application software were badly lacking documentation and had no defined style, so the task of documenting and reformatting the code came about.

During Winter Break (Christmastime) of the 2002/2003 academic year Matt Ellis volunteered to design a dynamic graph generator to show off the sales of the machine. The original version of BuildGraph was installed in early January 2003 following the December 2002 operating system reload.

In April 2003 the WebSoda project was able to be moved from a 75MHz Intel Pentium (I) based machine to an 850MHz Pentium III machine. This machine is on loan until the end of the 2002/2003 academic year, but a permanent replacement is said to be on its way.

In May 2003 WebSoda started accepting email to make the addresses for those seeking help easier. The help section was also completely redone including the addition of the FAQ.

Over the summer of 2003 the CSSE Department was relocated which put the machine in a more accessible location.

Sometime in late 2005, the soda host PC experienced a catastrophic hard drive failure. Fortunately, a backup of the code had been made, and data was restored to a new hard drive (OS build #5 ?). Sadly, no one was around at the time to get everything back up and running, so it lay dormant for about a year.

In the fall of 2006, Eric Lindberg volunteered to take over the machine's responsibilities, and restored it to working order. Soda.cs is still running on the good ol' 850MHz P-III. :)

After Eric graduated, Chris Leahy took over maintence of the Soda machine Currently a lot of the back-end code is being reorganized and written. Chris, Along with a few other people, are working on Mike's long sought after Sodabot.