Trojan Coffee Room Machine Returns

MKalus writes "It seems that when they turned it off it wasn't quite the end to the machine after all. The german magazine "Der Spiegel" bought it and got it repaired. And now it is online again, not in the Trojan room, but the same machine." You just can't keep a good coffee machine down.

Comments

for the lazy - translation

[Andre060]

http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F %2Fwww.spiegel.de%2Fnetzwelt%2Fnetzkultur%2F0%2C15 18%2C174146%2C00.html&langpair=de%7Cen&hl=en&prev= %2Flanguage_tools

Re:okay... I must have failed Nerd history 101 but

[VValdo]

From what I can recall, back in the early days of the Web, some programmers in the UK (?) set up a camera so they could check via an xwindow when the coffee in the other room was done. Like the Fish cam and Jennicam, the Trojan Room coffee cam is a part of Internet history.

The coffee machine was shut down earlier this year, but I guess it's back.

Re:why not include a translation

[tempmpi]

Maybe, a lot of stories written in german got posted to slashdot in the last time.

Here is a short summary:

The coffee machine made coffee for ten years. The first web cam made it famous, then it broke and they sold it at ebay. "Der Spiegel" payed 10452 DM for it. (about $4500)
The coffee machine was repaired for free. Now it works again in the rooms of "Spiegel - Online".

Re:okay... I must have failed Nerd history 101 but

[VValdo]

Here's probably a better link to it...

The Trojan Room Coffee Pot page which links to the page I listed before. There's also a "biography" of the coffee pot here

I totally remember loading this thing up w/ Mosaic. The shot of it being switched off is about what it looked like then-- tiny and black and white.

The story behind the coffee pot ...

[ags]

For those interested in the background, here is an edited Times article that I
collected when the Coffee Pot closed down:

WEDNESDAY MARCH 07 2001

*First star of the Internet retires*

BY JOANNA BALE

THE world's first Internet star is retiring after ten years in the
spotlight.

The unlikely star is a £40 coffee percolator that made its debut in front
of the camera when computer scientists at Cambridge University became
frustrated at walking down several flights of stairs only to find the pot
empty. They set up a camcorder, pointed it at the pot and wrote a program
to relay the image to their screens upstairs, so they would always know
when it was full.

When the World Wide Web was invented soon afterwards, they put it online as
the world's first webcam. Although it is the Internet equivalent of
watching paint dry, it became cult viewing, with 2.4 million visitors.

But now Cambridge's Trojan Room webcam and its subject are being consigned
to the history books because the university computer department is moving.
Dan Gordon, 33, a research scientist, said: "It will be turned off simply
because there is no more need for it.

"It became very popular because it was up and running when there really
wasn't very much else to look at on the Internet. We've kept it going using
old machines, but it quite often breaks down."

Quentin Stafford-Fraser, the man behind the pot website, said: "I first
rigged it up because we were fed up of traipsing half-way around the
building to find there was no coffee in the pot. At first, the image was
only updated about three times a minute - it is now one frame a second -
but that was fine because the pot filled rather slowly, and it was only
greyscale, which was also fine, because so was the coffee.

Actual Images for the Javascript Impaired

[dondelelcaro]

For those of you who don't browse the web with java script on and can't read javascript (or haven't bothered to update your copy of mozilla to the new milestone with selective javascript):

• Camera 1
  
• Camera 2

Re:10 Thousand marks for what?

[wik]

That was a possibility, but I never wanted to fork out money for a webcam back then. They were more expensive than the crappy USB cameras that you see now. :-)