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

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@umn.edu

608-274-6382

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