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Trojan Room Coffee Pot Auctioned Off
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 ;)
Your sig quotes a hungarian title. Are you?
In case you missed it, here's our Joy of Tech comic about the retiring of the coffee pot...
heh... "My HELL as CoffeeCam SLAVE"
-- Another senseless waste of fine bytes.
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.
It's at http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/coffee/coffee.html.
If I'd known it would be worth that much, I'd have nicked it when I was working in the lab...
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Check here.
They say they plan to repair it and run it with a webcam in some weeks.
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
[long, critical fetishistic analysis of the coffee pot snipped]
Whoa. Chill. Sometimes a coffee pot is just a coffee pot.
I guess they'll need updating now...
ctrl-alt-f
And it still works in the 0.9.3 (ish - home-built from CVS) version of Mozilla I'm running. It looks like the picture is stuck about 5 weeks out of date - is this a sign that the fishcam is dead?
SAY IT AIN'T SO!
Paranoia isn't an infectious condition, it's a way of life
When it sells for $5000, it's no longer just a coffee pot.
True. The buyer could have easily picked up a nice little espresso maker for under $5k.
For all you out there not capable of reading German: SPIEGEL Online promised to bring it back online in a few weeks - so they did in fact save it for the people.. EH
It was bought by Spiegel-Online, a german online news service.
The announcement is here (in German - try the babelfish version).
It's no substitute for some serious therapy, but maybe you should take this serial killer profile quiz, and in the meantime avoid any job that involves the Postal Servie.
No, it's not dead. It's resting.
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
Taco: how about auctioning off that other historical gem of the Internet Era: the Slashdot Cruiser? Where did that thing end up, anyway?
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
I used to have one of these and Iloved it, I started quite a few cool things on mine before I moved to a PIII.... Lemme See -
I had the Jennicam Activty monitor - a site which basically did comparisons between images coming from Jennicam.org and attempted to measure activity on the camera - I got this on a crappy internet TV show - I got a Free trip to Bournemouth of all places.
There's the complete solar system map which still runs at http://szyzyg.arm.ac.uk/~spm/neomap.html - this plots the position of all the planets *and* minor planets (about 100,000 now) every day.
Finally - I did my first live mp3 show from this machine (This predated shoutcast by two years) - Back in those days it took almost 90% of my cpu to encode the stream at 16kbit, it didn't sound particularly good either. Fortunately the broadcast was over a 128kbit connection so I couldn't sustain enough clients to cause any serious load on the server component.
Anyone want to buy the machine which had the world's first live mp3 radio station? Anyone want the DJ to come and play at your party?
Being bought by a German news service, I'm sure the cash will come through. I wonder when Netscape will auction off the fishcam? :)
Anyone remember the secret fishcam url/key combo?
æeee!
Wasn't there something else like this with a coke machine also? Or am I complete off track.
A journey of a thousand miles starts with a brutal anal raping at airport security
And then maybe post the news as a story on the main page.
And include a link so that we can all go look at what it used to look like when the number of visitors was in the order of about 10^2.
Hmmmmm......
I'd also like to suggest that they set up a webcam pointing at the old box, so that we can all watch it burst into flames and be totally beyond repair thanks to a heavy slashdotting starting moments after the link to it is posted, as it tries to handle thousands more hits than it was ever designed to take.
Kinda like a viking funeral, only without the boat.
Museums are already overflowing. The Smithsonian has more things in storage that on display to a ratio of 10:1 in certain departments. Why add to that? and why with a coffeepot?
The internet is a transient being. It is a constantly changing landscape whose historians are the users on it. The CoffeePot website will serve as more than an adequate reminder and is accesible to all people at all times (well, sans the government moderated internets in the far east). Placing this in a museum would be simply a waste of space.
// john athayde
# x@boboroshi.com
# http://www.boboroshi.com/
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 ;)
Have you checked behind the dry wall?
The reason it's less confusing is because it's little-endian instead of middle-endian. The year (most significant) is first, and the day (least significant) is last. The American system places the least significant datum in the middle.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
I can seem someone doing this to it (as seen here).
Just to take out a few frustrations
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
The creation of a false geek culture is at hand. There are many things, such as science fiction like Dune, that merit the slavering worship of Slashdotters. Dune for instance brings up many pressing scientific and ethical issues.
This coffee pot does not.
It's rather a fetish, a symbol for religious worship in the attempt to create community. It is supposed to radiate defiance and humor, but it doesn't. It's rather empty in fact.
It's not the first webcam, the coffee pot is the object of observation of the first webcam. It glorified a culture of work, actually, business culture in geekdom before it existed; people would drink the coffee, and as the pot emptied and refilled it was a metaphor for productivity.
It's like selling the dust that someone scraped up from the NASA lab when they were testing a Mars camera. It's not the dust from Mars, but an adjunct to the technical process in developing a Mars camera. Its meaning is borrowed and tenuous.
The actual web cam would be a better auction item, at least it would have some interesting technical value. This coffee pot can't even make coffee- it leaks water, according to the EBAY ad. In fact, it may not even be the real Trojan coffee pot, unless you are one of those geeks who has some snapshots of the motherfucker on your hard drive somewhere, in which case you are the exact sort of geek I am decrying against here. You are fetishizing the meaningless and debasing the real meaning all the while.
Geeks are supposed to be separate from the self-referentialism, fake romance, and vapidity of the modern age. Act like it.
Goat sex free since 2001