When I was a young child in the early '60s, a store in Gadsden, AL, down the street from my grandmother's house, had one of these. There was nothing better than pulling out a Coke, in the old heavy glass bottle, from that just-this-side-of-freezing water. They had a towel hanging from a peg in the front of the machine for you to dry off the bottle, next to the opener. I remember them having Coke, Nehi orange and grape, Sprite, Dr. Pepper, Double Cola (a regional brand), RC Cola (another regional brand), Tab (which was awful) and Yoo-Hoo (which was also awful). They had a grape drink that IIRC was yellow in color, carbonated, and not as sweet as Nehi. I liked them, but one day they didn't have them anymore. My great uncle told me that the company that made them had gone out of business. That was a difficult concept for a 5-year-old to understand.
RP2813, I remember the type of machine you are talking about. The bottles hung from metal tracks, which held them at the narrow part of the neck, a couple of inches under the cap. There were several rows. You'd slide the one you wanted to the end of the row, where there was a perpendicular track that ran to an area where it was wider, but there was a plastic piece that prevented the bottle from being pulled out. When you point coins in, you could pull on the bottle and the plastic piece would tilt up out of the way and let you pull the bottle out. It was purely mechanical except for the refrigeration. I last saw one of these in the early '80s, in an office where I was a co-op student. Since we bought drinks in bulk from the distributor, they rented us the machine cheap and gave us the keys. We set it for free dispense and just had everyone chip in every two weeks to pay for the delivery. One day we had a computer prototype that kept shutting down because it was overheating. So we put it inside the drink machine. It worked perfectly. The distributor delivery guy showed up and wondered why the machine had ribbon cables running out from under the lid...
