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Trojan Room Coffee Pot Auctioned Off

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the its-a-sad-day dept.

dlesko writes "The historic Trojan Room coffee pot at The University of Cambridge has gone to the highest bidder on ebay for £3,350.00 (that's about $5,055.20 USD based on the currency rates as of 8/12/01). You can see the results for about 90days. Now they just have to hope that the person actually comes through with the dough..." A fitting end to a net.legend. If I could figure out where Arial, my old DEC Alpha Multia that was the original Slashdot, I would auction that off and give the cash to the EFF (minus shipping a cost of a case of beer ;) Dave? Rosie? Where did that thing go? I know it was finally retired as the SMTP server... I probably should get it back someday ;)

8 of 101 comments (clear)

  1. Re:EH? by Pope · · Score: 3, Informative
    It's better explained by visiting one of the URL's posted in this discussion, but to be brief: a camera was aimed at a coffee pot, and captured images that could be viewed remotely to see if any coffee was there, saving a long and often unrewarding trip from the Lab to the coffee room.

    Back when "Wired" magazine was cool and not dedicated to the pursuit of $4000 CD players, they had a whole section on cool things on the Net. Two of the first places I ever went to were the Trojan Room Coffee Pot, and the CMU Coke machine Web interface. I still have a printout from the CMU machine ca. 1994, using NCSA Mosaic!

    --
    It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
  2. University of Cambridge official coffee pot site by almaw · · Score: 2, Informative

    It's at http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/coffee/coffee.html.

  3. German News Magazine Spiegel bought it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Check here.
    They say they plan to repair it and run it with a webcam in some weeks.

  4. The real reason this is happening.... by Jakdaw · · Score: 2, Informative

    Of course the real reason this is happening is that the Trojan Room is no more - the computer lab is moving to a new building. Guess what it's called.... yep you got it " The William Gates Building " Selling the coffee-pot, accepting money from Microsoft.. they must be really desperate!

    Thank god I've graduated :)

    1. Re:The real reason this is happening.... by Skaffen · · Score: 2, Informative

      Actually, (IIRC) the money for the building came from Gates himself via the William Gates Foundation rather than from Microsoft, which kinda makes naming it after him more (though not entirely) forgivable. Also MS are not sharing the building with the CUCL as was orginally planned as they decided they wanted larger premises.

  5. Re:EH? by quentinsf · · Score: 2, Informative
    You can read my history of the coffee pot on the web site, and I think there should also be a brief article about it in the July Communications of the ACM. Haven't received mine yet.

    I guess they'll need updating now...

  6. Bought by a German online news service by affenmann · · Score: 4, Informative

    It was bought by Spiegel-Online, a german online news service.
    The announcement is here (in German - try the babelfish version).

  7. Re:EH? by Tom7 · · Score: 2, Informative

    The coke machine was at CMU (in the grad CS lounge); you could finger it to see the quantity of soda and their temperature.

    http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~coke/history_long.txt