Website Graveyard

The Internet is a dynamic playing field. Websites come and go. A few websites we really liked have gone. Gone but not forgotten. We want to remember them. This chapter is our Memorial Park for these websites.

This is the shortest chapter in this book. We are grateful for that. It means only a few of our favorite websites have died.

█ Cambridge Coffee Pot Cam

The coffee cam was the world’s first webcam connected to the Internet. Originally it was connected to a local network at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory in 1991. It made its debut on the World Wide Web in 1993.

There was a very practical reason for setting up the coffee cam. (Dull men are practical.) Some of the laboratory’s workers worked far away from the coffee pot. They needed a way of knowing when the coffee was ready.

■ Death Notice

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/cgi-bin/xvcoffee

The death notice was brief, and sad . . . click here.[1]

■ Official Biography (non technical)

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/coffee/qsf/coffee.html

■ Technical Paper

http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2324.txt

A treat for dull men: nine pages, single spaced, explaining in great detail each technical aspect of the coffee brewing and how it makes its way onto the web.

■ Wikipedia’s coverage

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Room_coffee_pot

You can read about the switch off here. The camera was finally switched off at 9:54 a.m. on 22 August 2001. The coffee pot, the fourth or fifth one seen on-line, was sold on eBay for £3,350. The switch off made front page coverage in The Times and The Washington Post as well as articles in The Guardian and Wired.

█ waitallday.com

This website was winner of our Dull Website of the Years for several years running. We would watch it for hours on end. But then, all of a sudden, it disappeared — without a trace.

When you first looked at this website, it was a black DOS screen with two words in green: “Please Wait.” For a while, you would think that was all there was. Eventually you would see something happening at the bottom of your screen. A scroll. At first you would take the scroll seriously. Eventually you would realize that you were being had. The scroll was a hoax.

■ joys-of-computing.com (a resurrection)

Following the demise of waitallday.com, we constructed out own replica of it. We called it “joys-of-computing” . . . click here.[2]

To remove the surprise element for you — to take away the excitement — to assure it will be a truly dull experience — here is what you will see in the scroll:

“Buffering”

"Defragging"

"Reconfiguring terminal permissions"

"Engaging warp drive"

"Uploading advanced turbothrustors"

"Taking break to floss"

"Switching relayed inputs"

"Phoning Help Desk"

"Cleaning back of your screen"

█ Pylon of the Month

http://users.tinyonline.co.uk/bigh/bigh/pylonof.htm

If you truly wanted to celebrate the ordinary, this was a must-see website. As its home page says, “This site is dedicated to the humble electricity pylon, whose beauty remains tragically unrecognized.”

As the last month we see a Pylon of the Month pictured is December 2000, we assume this website has now reached even greater heights — Website Heaven.

The good news is that replaced by the Pylon Appreciation Society . . . click here.[3]

█ North American Stone Skipping Association

http://www.yeeha.net/nassa/a1.html

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“It is a sad thing that nowadays there is so little useless information”

Oscar Wilde

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