Prancing Pony vending machine at Stanford AI Lab as remembered by Les Ernest:

[1974 Computer controlled vending machine (Prancing Pony), which had a gambling option and automatically billed via email]

The Prancing Pony Vending Machine was evidently the first computer controlled vending machine anywhere in the world. It was created to fill an unmet need.

Given that SAIL was about five miles off-campus and the nearest food source was a beer garden (Zotts) about a mile away, I initially set up a coffee and food room near the center of our facility and it subsequently got named after a pub in Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings". In fact all rooms in our facility were named after places in Middle Earth and had signs posted on the doors showing their names in both Latin and Elvish alphabets. At some point the Stanford Buildings folks asked me to number our rooms and give them a map. Instead we gave them a map showing room names in both alphabets. Their response was to send out a carpenter with numbered tags, which he nailed on each door.

Meanwhile we took turns buying coffee and food, which was offered for sale on an honor system basis. That worked well for awhile but it suddenly started losing money big time. We then negotiated with Canteen, which had an exclusive contract with Stanford, to put in a couple of vending machines. However we found that they were not restocked often enough and broke rather frequently.

I finally negotiated to rent a machine from Canteen that we could restock. They seemed to like this idea since it would relieve them of making frequent trips out to our distant facility. In fact they never billed us for the rental even though I repeatedly called it to their attention. Meanwhile I got Ted Panofsky to make a connection to our computer so that it could release the doors on the vending machine, thus making it possible to buy either for cash or, though a computer terminal, on credit. I then wrote a program that let people buy under password control and that billed them on a monthly basis via email. It was set up to randomly give away whatever was purchased on 1/128th of the purchases and offered a "double or nothing" option, which had an honest 50:50 outcome. I noticed a cultural difference in that almost none of the computer science students gambled, knowing that they would win 1/128th of the time if they didn't, whereas many of the music students did gamble. In both cases the Prancing Pony vending machine, having taken on the name of the room, seemed quite popular and we organized a team of volunteers to acquire the needed supplies and restock the machine at least twice a day.

The Prancing Pony also sold beer but only on credit and only to people over 21, since it knew everyone’s age. If a youngster attempted to buy beer it responded “Sorry, kid.”

Some years later I found out why the honor system had failed in the Pony. I was the founding President of Imagen Corp., which made the first desktop publishing systems using laser printers, and after awhile there a young woman employee felt obligated to confess that when she was a teenybopper, she and her girlfriends used to ride their horses up to SAIL, then went in and stole candy from the Prancing Pony. Thus, her misconduct contributed to a technological advancement.