You might think that writing an article about coffee is off-topic for an IT business, but you’d be wrong for at least a couple of reasons, at least as far as we see it. Most of us IT types (at least the old-skool ones) have at some part in our career lived on coffee. Whether it’s because we’ve spent all night cabling offices, recovering data, or simply been engrossed in some time consuming computer based leisure activity such as gaming coding, coffee has been with us along the way.
In the late 1980’s, such was the importance of coffee to the gents at Cambridge University they rigged up a camera and pointed it at a coffee pot in their computer lab so that staff would know when a fresh pot had been brewed. At this stage the camera would take three images per minute which would be visible on the internal network, this is before the world wide web became a thing.
In 1993 the images of the coffee pot were made accessible on the world wide web – and the webcam (and live streaming) as we know it was born. There is a pretty good article here on the BBC web site that covers this, which includes a blast-from-the-past video from Look East.
We might not have our coffee live streamed across the web, but we do take it seriously.
In line with our Purpose and Values, we have for several years been purchasing coffee sourced from the Zapatista farmers in the Chiapas region of Mexico. Zapatista Coffee helps the people of Chiapas Mexico to safeguard their own idioms & culture, organising their own access to education, health & land through direct democracy. Historically we had been purchasing this from Active Distribution, but more recently we’ve found the campaigning caterers at veggies.org.uk for our coffee supplies, and we’ve also made donations to the Zapatista Solidarity Fund.
We’d encourage you to think about where you buy your coffee from, and if you want to try before you buy, feel free to pop in and have a brew with us while we mull over your computing headaches! Contact us to make an appointment today!