Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
I sure hope they changed the filter by now.
Anyone care to give us the pre-punch (i.e. history) of this? :)
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
A good Christmas present to lighten the spirit... and I don't even drink coffee!
What a gift for christmas.. Bringing back the cool technology of yesterday.. danke der Spiegel.
Ever since I heard abotu this I've wanted to actualy see it, now I can. I'm quite happy
Im wondering though, waht kinda traffic si this site gonna get? I mean, after the slashdoting is over. Good or bad? What do you guys think?
In Soviet Russia you dant have to put up with these crappy jokes
The coffee machine was shut down earlier this year, but I guess it's back.
-------------------
This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
There'd be some way to monitor who is drinking the coffe, and, most importantly, who isn't making a fresh pot when they drain it!!! Man I hate that....must be my caffeine addiction talking! Got to feed that Jones!!!
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".
Jan
as seen here:
http://www.worldlingo.com/wl/Translate?wl_lp=DE-EN &wl_fl=2&wl_url=http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/net zkultur/0,1518,174146,00.html&wl_g_table=-3
Although this is German, and you know how that translates to English.
[smile]
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
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.
-------------------
This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
this thing is going to end up in the Smithsonian on display as a proud emblem of the geekiness of the early internet.
:-)
Somehow I find this both amusing and disturbing.
[note to self. patent the idea NOW]
Note of interest is that apparently was the first web cam ever, and it served a pratical purpose for the geeks whom it depended on that cup of coffee.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
From the translation:
But which one makes with an icon of the Webs?
Throw away? Not possibly!
I love online translators.
Per the /. story about its retirement. It was the first ever webcam, and it was used so people knew when there was coffee and then there wasn't. Talk about a technology stemming from a developer's itch!
Ethernet port and built in webserver, eh? I don't see anyone stopping you, go to it man!
My Karma was at 49, then they switched to words. All that work for nothing!
Whoa hehe. At first I thought it said "The Trojan Machine in the Coffee Room." Those are at bars, but not in our coffee room!
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.
There outside perhaps the Trojan Room Coffee machine brueht and bubbles and steams again, almost approximately around the clock and those locally warms itself stomach and hands at the hot coffee, and those a little the heart.
locally warms a little the heart, doesn't it?
The comeback of the Trojan Room Coffee Cam
The legendary Krups ProAroma out of the even more legendary "Trojan Room" wrote history as the worldwide first webcam. She didn't get thrown away last August because SPIEGEL ONLINE together with a sponsor bought it from the University. Now she is makingn coffee again.
CAM 1 CAM 2
Ten years she fullfilled her duties, brewing coffee. Hundreds of Students and workers at the computer lab at the University of Cambridge warmed their hands and stomachs with the coffee. Million of Web-Surfers from all over the world watched. The Trojan Room Coffee Machine wrote web history since 1994 as the worldwide first webcam. Then, in the summer of 2001, she was supposed to go offline forever.
The computer lab in Cambridge moved, this was one of the reasons. The coffee, say some of the users, was for quite some time more cult than anything else - another reason. And then, in the spring of 2001, the Krups ProAroma died: An era was obviously coming to an end.But what to do with an icon of the web?
Throw it away? Not possible!
She was put up for the higest bidder and SPIEGEL ONLINE together with the Health company Fresenius as a sponsor bought it for the impressive price of DM 10,452.70: Again the "Trojan Coffee Maker" wrote history - the most expensive broken coffee maker in the world.
But she was destined to brew coffee again, she was supposed to send the steamy pictures back out into the web-world. The employees from the manufacturer Krups knew what to do: Free of charge they were going to repair this classic - even though the gurantee had long expired. So she left the office of SPIEGEL ONLINE as soon as she had come in.
And she came back, repaired, as god as new, but still the old. And so, like you could watch her from 1994 until 2001 in Cambridge you can watch her now again, out of two perspectives. The Trojan-Room-Coffee-Machine brews, blubbers and steams again, almost around the clock. And the people nearby are warming their hands and stomachs with the hot coffee, and out there, some maybe the heart.
If you want to e-mail me, use my PGP Key.
What I really appreciated from the article is that they do have a sense of perspective. It is a coffee machine, as they put it "the most expensive broken coffee machine in the world" when they bought it. Yet, a significant event in the history of the web. Hundreds of people warmed themselves with the coffee while millions of people looked at it online. The first web cam. They simply couldn't allow such an icon of the Web to be thrown away. Thanks to them, it's a piece of 'Net history that continues to lives on. I can only hope that it ends up in the Smithsonian some day, but it's our own fault if it doesn't. Thanks to the staff at Spiegel for doing this. It hasn't saved the world, but it has helped to preserve part of it. Vielen Dank von Ihrem Kameraden bei Slashdot. Froeliche Weihnachten und eines Gutes Neues Jahr.
You must be the change you wish to see in the world - Ghandi
Hurm... I'll be in Germany this coming month... I wonder if I found the Speigel office if they'd let me have my picture taken with it. Or, perhaps even have a cup of coffee from it- oh the joy in that thought. What better way to celebrate a trip to a foreign country than by paying homage to the first internationally known coffee maker.
On a side note- After seeing that translation page I have never been more glad that I took german in high school and college. Egads.
No one expects the Spanish Inquisition!
Now if it had an ethernet port and a built in webserver showing how hot the coffee is and how much is left it would be a whole nother matter.
As long as it complies with RFC 2324 then I am all for it.
forth ?love if honk then
http://www.donarmstrong.com
It turns out that sensing the amount of water in the pot is quite difficult. If you use a scale, it has to handle heat, humidity, and steam if you put it under the pot. If you put it under the machine, you will also have plenty of water screwing up measurements because it stays in the filter. I thought about bouncing a laser diode over the surface of the water, but that never materialized. I also tried measuring the capacitance of the coffee between two places (more coffee = more conductive dielectric). That didn't work. Coffee and tea are great conductors.
Finally, I took a plastic ruler, drilled holes in it and hooked wires from a ribbon cable up to it, at a regular spacing. The coffee would short between a pin at a certain height (each pin was attached to an R2 ladder) and the ground pin at the bottom. This actually worked reasonably well! (If you could stand a ruler in your coffee pot!)
Oh, I didn't want to figure out how to write a web hit counter CGI script, so I had the stamp store the number of hits in the stamp's EEPROM! Much easier! I still have the code and the hardware lying around, though the coffee machine is long gone (last attached to a DECstation 5000/260, actually).
/ \
\ / ASCII ribbon campaign for peace
x
/ \
"On 11th November 1994, we were visited by a reporter from our local radio station, BBC Radio Cambridgeshire, to make a report on this service. Naturally we connected a radio to one of our workstations and relayed the broadcast over our local network. The transmission was also recorded digitally, and now you can hear it too (1.5Mb, 3'20").
We are grateful to BBC Radio Cambridgeshire for giving permission to put this audio file on the Web."
It's a cup of the history of networking. Read the article.
Me not know english? That's umpossible!
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
The whole point of the initial cam was to let others know whether or not there was coffee already brewed.
Due to their poor lighting/camera/whatever, it is impossible to tell whether or not there is coffee in the coffeemaker.
-- yawn. --
Why would you need one? You're nowhere near the coffee machine anymore, anyway. I'm better off. As Der Spiegel is located here at Hamburg, it is merely half an hour for me from a quick glance via the cam down to their offices to borrow a hot pot. Still quite some lottery game, but hey! Free coffee!
I'd like some chemical analysis being built in there and displayed online as well, though, just to make sure no-one put in decaffeinated 'coffee'...
A World in a Grain of Sand / Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Infinity in the Palm of your Hand / And Eternity in an Hour.
Translation of first parahraph.
For ten years it did its duty, brewing coffee. Hundreds of students and workers at the computer lab of Cambridge University warmed their hands and stomachs with it. Millions of web surfers from all over the world know it as the Trojan Room Coffee machine, which in 1994 became the first focus of a webcam. Then, in the summer of 2001, it disappeared forever.
No comment at this time
Well, duh, it's X-mas eve, and at the time of your posting it's past 10 PM in Germany, so noone is there, hence the lights are off.
Don't forget RFC 2325 ofcourse for network managment of coffee pots.
Make even shorter URLs - 8LN.org
Why don't more nerds in universities/companies do things like this? There's a whole heap of stuff you could do.
1) Hook up water and a supply of coffee direct to the machine. This way you could control the ENTIRE coffee creation process remotely so that you have coffee waiting for you.
2) Run Linux on it and have the coffee machine actually control the webcam.
3) Implement a thermostat so that you can go get coffee when it's at a nice drinkable temperature, rather than getting burnt straight away.
4) Hook a car battery and some wheels up to it, and make it mobile. Then program it with everyone's coffee preferences, and have it work out a route around the building delivering coffee. Y'know, just like those robots at the start of Short Circuit.
mogorific carpentry experiments
I think given the historical nature of this now-repaired coffeemaker, I think Krups ought to seriously look at running some sort of international advertising campaign using this coffeemaker. It could be a pretty effective idea, too. :-)
> Beeing too bureaucratic to be inventive,
;-)
;-)")
It's a fact that only one person can invent
something for the first time... do you know who
invented automobiles?
> Annotation: If you following the online
> site of DER SPIEGEL [spiegel.de], you'll soon
> find out that they are notorious sinners against
> the spirit of the Web by not offering links to
> those sites, which are the current subjects
> of their stories. Why? Fear to lose eyeballs
> to the endless wilderness of the Web? Ignorance?
Normally, Spiegel Online offers links to related
sites below their articles. They also offer links
to older articles published by Spiegel Online, and
if you had followed those links, you would have
found a link to the trojan room cam.
Perhaps your problem is that you don't understand
german? Sorry, Der Spiegel is a german magazine,
intended for german readers. I don't complain that
/. is in english only even I'm from germany. In
case of problems with an english text I take a
look into my dictionary rather than blame the
author for writing in a language that I don't
understand.
> "Guten Tag", Zeit zum aufwachen ihr Schnarcher
Guten Morgen mein Freund, in Deutschland stehen
die Menschen 6 bis 9 Stunden früher auf als in
Amerika
(Sorry. "Good morning my friend, in germany people
rise up 6 to 9 hours earlier than in america
Frohe Weihnachten!
There was a mention of this in the ACM magazine, Communications of the ACM.
An online version of the article can be found here.
It turns out that sensing the amount of water in the pot is quite difficult.
Use a rubber ball on a stick like your toilet. You goddam nerds try to complicate everything.
Yea, behold the BreadCam! (and it's descendant, PilchardCam)
Remember to read the legal notice beforehand though.
After looking at your post, I decided to look at the (much beloved) fishcam again. I looked at it and it appears to say, "JavaScript Fire Department" behind the machine.
Well, gald to know it's still working.
Ok...I've read the link, and the comments, and there is STILL something I don't understand about this: Why is it called the "Trojan" coffee machine?
Remember, there were no nuclear weapons before women were allowed to vote.
It's a Christmas miracle!
--T
http://www.theMediaBunker.com
... why the geeks didn't get thier own pot of coffee and keep it closer?
:)
Of course, then the webcam would've never been born, and then were would we all be?
-
Wouldn't it have been smarter to use image analysis? Just find the pot in the picture then look for the liquid line. It's fortunate the machine was white. You'd have to take the handle into account.
But this seems a heck of a lot smarter than putting wires in or on the pot.
http://www.bbspot.com/News/2000/5/office_jesus.htm l
At any rate, I'm not quite sure how you would get a measurement out of this. Attach the stick to a loose potentiometer? Not to mention, the stick would have to have a useful range of movement 80 to 90 degrees in order to capture the information that you want. My guess is that it would be less accurate than the ruler, but if you just want a ballpark measurement, it might work fine.
/ \
\ / ASCII ribbon campaign for peace
x
/ \
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. :-)
/ \
\ / ASCII ribbon campaign for peace
x
/ \
I assume you just want to know when the coffee is done (your pot is full). All your toilet does is check when the water in the tank is full by having a floating rubber ball on a stick. When the stick is bent to 90 degrees, the toilet stops filling the tank. Instead, you could hook it up to a buzzer or whatever. I think this would be perfectly accurate, and relatively easy to set up. If you wanted to know how close you were to full, you'd have to do a little more math to make this work.
>>> Beeing too bureaucratic to be inventive,
;-)
:-)
>> It's a fact that only one person can invent
>> something for the first time... do you know
>> who invented automobiles?
> Yeah, the car is a great invention from the
> 19th century. And at this time the old world
> was at the bleeding edge of innovation
And as we all know, automobiles seem still to be
interesting for research. And AFAIK research
e.g. on fuel saving car engines is done in europe,
while americans often seem not to have an idea
why one should do that. (So if we are talking
about automobiles...)
> While ahead at that time there are decent
> signs that we have fallen behind.
Tell us about these signs. software development?
Physics? Biology? Chemistry?
Or is it because the first man on the moon was an
american?
> Very often DER SPIEGEL _doesn't_ offer links
> to web sites which are the subject of their
> stories.
hm. If you think so. But yes, that's surely a
crime, and criminals surely should not own relics
like the trojan room coffee machine.
> Now since they bought that old
> coffee machine as an advertising vehicle to
> prove their geekness,
Perhaps they didn't buy it as a "proof of their
geekness"? Probably I'm not an exceptional geek,
but I wouldn't be unhappy about having the machine
in my own kitchen.
What's the problem that this thing has been bought
by a german magazine? Everyone could have bought
it. Imagine that microsoft would have done it.
Would it be better then, because MS is a company
from the "new world", where everything is
unquestionable better?
> Sorry to say that german is my mother tongue
> because I'm german...
Do you still live in germany?
>>> "Guten Tag", Zeit zum aufwachen ihr Schnarcher
>> Guten Morgen mein Freund, in Deutschland stehen
>> die Menschen 6 bis 9 Stunden früher auf als in
>> Amerika
> Standing up 6 to 9 hours earlier doesn't help
> to regain the lead when you are years behind
> (spirit wise).
Not everyone wants to (re)gain the kind of leadership USA has. If you feel comfortable with
that leadership, go there (if you are not already
there), you will have friends there.
Or in plain german: Immer dieses langweilige, substanzlose Gemecker. Immer Nörgeln und dann weggehen. Das ist in der Tat eine deutsche Tugend.
Again: where is europe years behind?
yours, Dr. Hassel
Ahh geez, you know we geeks don't have anything to do ;)
:)
Just kidding. I realized I should have given a link to a translation in the first place
Enjoy.
If you want to e-mail me, use my PGP Key.
The advantage of the ruler was that I only had to calibrate it once (the resistors were fixed and outside the coffee machine) and it was easy to remove for cleaning. It also had an obvious failure mode (sometimes it would read -13 cups, then you'd know there was short somewhere).
The point of this project was to have fun, of course, not to make a coffee machine that people would ever drink from. Overengineered? Probably. But it was cool to have an LED flash everytime someone hit the webserver. And hey, doesn't everyone want to know the temperature of their dorm room to within 10 degrees rankine? (yep, it reported kelvin and rankine)
/ \
\ / ASCII ribbon campaign for peace
x
/ \
Does europe really stand for BTX (=Bildschirmtext)?
;-)
On the other hand: with Bildschirmtext and minitel
europe had a kind of primitive web years before
the rest of the world had even the slightest idea
about WWW.
And as I've learned, WWW, its underlying protocols
and server/client programs were invented at CERN,
which is somehow closely related to europe.
BTW: the site bildschirmtext.bundespost.de points
to something that looks like "those were the
days". Not a good example. Perhaps you have not
heard the news that the Bundespost isn't existing
anymore? (Perhaps you have left germany 10 years
ago? They say that news in america are a little
bit USA-centric...
Again, what's the problem with europe?
yours, Dr. Hassel