FOOD FUNDA: Coffee On Line

Sunday 22 July 2012

Coffee On Line

German newsmagazine Spiegal Online bought the piece of internet nostalgia, a broken Krups ProAroma coffee-maker, which it plans to continue displaying on the web.Internet users have flocked in their thousands to view the machine slowly percolating in the university's computer lab, known as the Trojan Room.The coffee pot cam was set up in 1991 to allow Cambridge programmers sprawled over several floors in a university building know if coffee was available, thus saving fruitless trips up and down flights of stairs to an empty coffee machine.A small picture on a user's computer screen provided minute-by-minute updates on the state of the coffee.Quentin Stafford-Fraser, one of the authors of the coffee cam software, said in his online biography of the coffee pot cam that it was the most useful thing he wrote in his time working on computer networks.