Hello Jim and SIGCIS,
Two references come to mind:
1. The "Trojan Room coffee pot" at the U of Cambridge is often cited as the first live camera on the web:
- Quentin Stafford-Fraser, “On Site: The Life and Times of the First Web Cam,” Communications of the ACM 44, no. 7 (July 1, 2001): 25–26.
https://doi.org/10.1145/379300.379327.
- Full text of above without paywall:
https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/coffee/qsf/cacm200107.html- Captured by the Wayback Machine on 10 December 1997:
http://web.archive.org/web/19971210230542/http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/coffee/coffee.html2. Roy Levin of Microsoft Research published a paper about running an industry lab in which he recommends that managers "INSTALL A WORLD-CLASS COFFEE MACHINE" and notes that "the first capital purchase" at MSR-Silicon Valley was an espresso machine.
- Roy Levin, “A Perspective on Computing Research Management,” ACM SIGOPS Operating Systems Review 41, no. 2 (April 1, 2007): 3–9,
https://doi.org/10.1145/1243418.1243420.
I've heard other lore about coffee culture at Microsoft that involves the proximity of Starbucks in the 1990s. Allegedly, management lobbied for coffee carts in every building to keep programmers from driving to off-campus coffeehouses. No cite for that one but it would be fun to track down the origin of the story.
Looking forward to a caffeinated special issue of the Annals on the transnational history of stimulants and computing.
Best of luck,
Kevin Driscoll
U of Virginia