[SIGCIS-Members] Help on Coffee and Computing

[James Sumner]

What a wonderful question!

The kind of short insider-humour pieces that circulated so readily as 
email forwards and on Usenet, bulletin boards and early Web forums would 
no doubt be worth surveying for mentions of coffee dependency. (From 
their nature, of course, it's often hard to firmly identify original 
authorship, but much easier to document the spread and mutation of these 
pieces over time.)

So, the "BOFH Excuse List" preserved in various places including 
<http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ballard/bofh/excuses> – which, as far as I 
can work out, began as an outgrowth of Simon Travaglia's "Bastard 
Operator From Hell" sysadmin pyschosis saga, with fans adding their own 
suggestions – includes the excuses "operators on strike due to broken 
coffee machine" and "firmware update in the coffee machine".

In "A helpdesk log" as preserved at 
<https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~mbaur/j1.html> (often assumed to be another 
BOFH production, but different in style) the dastardly admin reassigns a 
crucial server's UPS to the coffee-maker, leaves the phone off the hook 
while creating an "@CoffeeMake macro", and ends the day by plugging the 
coffee-maker into an Ethernet hub "to see what happens. Not (too) much."

Cheers
James


On 20/07/2020 20:41, James Cortada wrote:
>
> The IT community of users, programmers, vendors, etc have for decades 
> had a reputation for being extensive consumers of coffee. In some 
> parts of the IT ecosystem, especially among those who work odd hours, 
> such as programmers, computer operators, and vendor field engineers.  
> I am studying the corporate ephemera of this industry and its cultural 
> attachments, such as coffee cups and what they tell us about 
> computing.  Do any of you have any information, ephemera, or sources 
> and citations on this specific issue of coffee and computing?  I can 
> get many industry folks, such as IBM retirees, to wax eloquently on 
> the subject in their private FB accounts, but that is not enough.  
> Corporate culture is tough to study.  Thanks in advance for your 
> help.  Jim
> -- 
> James W. Cortada
> Senior Research Fellow
> Charles Babbage Institute
> University of Minnesota
> jcortada at umn.edu <mailto:jcortada at umn.edu>
> 608-274-6382
>
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