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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 ;)
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.
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.
[long, critical fetishistic analysis of the coffee pot snipped]
Whoa. Chill. Sometimes a coffee pot is just a coffee pot.
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 It looks like the picture is stuck about 5 weeks out of date - is this a sign that the fishcam is dead?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
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).
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