Nice. Reminds me of the Carnegie-Mellon Coke vending machine I read about, said to have been at least one of the earliest connected devices, in 1982. It would report how many bottles were left and how many were cold (based on tracking how long they'd been in the machine).

P.S Broken link at http://snackbot.net/ "Check out this blog post for more details on how SnackBot was built." http://sww.sas.com/sites/pepriv/snackbot