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<p>What a wonderful question! <br>
</p>
<p>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.)</p>
<p>So, the "BOFH Excuse List" preserved in various places including
<a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ballard/bofh/excuses"><http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ballard/bofh/excuses></a> – 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". <br>
</p>
<p>In "A helpdesk log" as preserved at
<a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~mbaur/j1.html"><https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~mbaur/j1.html></a> (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."</p>
<p>Cheers<br>
James</p>
<p><br>
</p>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 20/07/2020 20:41, James Cortada
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite"
cite="mid:CAAtzX67wGoaZ9G5OqgN=vq0QazfOFXZehhp5SKVhFp9Tc8u2ow@mail.gmail.com">
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<div>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 </div>
-- <br>
<div dir="ltr" class="gmail_signature"
data-smartmail="gmail_signature">
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<div>James W. Cortada</div>
<div>Senior Research Fellow</div>
<div>Charles Babbage Institute</div>
<div>University of Minnesota</div>
<div><a href="mailto:jcortada@umn.edu" target="_blank"
moz-do-not-send="true">jcortada@umn.edu</a></div>
<div>608-274-6382</div>
</div>
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<br>
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