Cult coffee pot sold to Germans

A £25 coffee machine which grew to cult status on the web has been sold to a German internet company for £3350.

Cambridge scientists working in the cavernous buildings of the University's engineering labs first built the webcam-style monitoring system, known as XCoffee, in 1991, before the world wide web had been invented.

Networking researchers from the Trojan Room, who all shared one coffee pot, grew tired of making long trips downstairs to the machine only to find it empty, and decided that the easiest solution would be to build a computer system to monitor it.

Coffee pot user Quentin Stafford-Fraser writes in his online biography of the pot that the "system only took us a day or so to construct, but was rather more useful than anything else I wrote while working on networks. It also made a better topic of conversation at dinner parties than ATM protocols".

When XCoffee was phased out, two lab workers rebuilt the system to work on the world wide web. Hundreds of thousands of fans across the globe have since logged on for updates on what soon became one of the world's best loved coffee machines.

The researchers are now moving to a new lab and decided to auction the machine on eBay. The proceeds will be put towards the purchase of an espresso machine for the new premises.