The bulk of this information comes from the old Chez Bob website (credits page, CSE Uptime articles, legacy GitHub repository). If you have any arcane Chez Bob lore you would like to see added here (or if you see any inaccuracies or gaps), please let us know!
From Bob Bowdidge and Bob Carragher, in the November 1990 issue of Uptime: "CCCP had its beginnings as two different co-ops which were run by Neil Rhodes (Coke and candy) and the nameless group of 'caffeine addicts.'"
From Patricia Naughton, in the December 1990 issue of Uptime: "CCCP was going in 1974/5 when I used to collect money from a Coke Machine that we had in AP&M 4301, which then was a faculty / student / staff lounge. We furnished coffee and cookies, etc. from the Price Club, and each week a man came to fill up the coke machine with different types of sodas; we could then buy a coke from the machine for 10 cents.
Since I collected all the money and was robbed 2 or 3 times we decided to get a checking account.
Two former students and myself had a checkbook and the names of the two grads and myself were on the checks. We would deposit the money, ALL DIMES, mostly, and pay expenses from the checks.
This went on for many years under the name of the Applied Physics and Information Science Department (APIS), later changed to Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences (EECS), and, after a few years Sue Merritt finally took over the check book ... (never did find out what she did with the money but guess she saved it to go to Africa this year)."
[Sue reports her trip to Africa was great, but did use those funds in question to bankroll the current incarnation of CCCP discussed in last month's issue. - Ed.]
Cobbling together information from the credits page and from Bob Bowdidge and Bob Carragher in the November 1990 issue of Uptime: "The CCCP (Coffee and Candy Co-oP) was formed by Sue Merritt and Jim Mattson, in order to resurrect and combine the previous co-ops. Roughly 6 different brands of soda, 6 different types of candy bars, and coffee (all from Price Club Costco) were orignially stocked. Weekly resupply trips were made with Sue's Toyota Corolla as the vehicle of choice. At this point, the grad lounge didn't even exist! The co-op operated in 3218, then the department library, using a makeshift lockbox epoxied to a table."
More from the November 1990 issue of Uptime: "The modest investment brought a modest return, enough to sponsor two grad beach-picnics per year. Also, a little bit of help arrived from GSA via Dan Rose, in the form of a coffee maker.
However, [Sue and Jim] burned out, and darkness fell upon CCCP until Dave DeMers revived it during the Spring and Summer of 1989. Following Dave was Tim Ash, whose tenure ran through Spring 1990."
From the credits page: "After a brief period during which it was unclear who ran the co-op, Robert Bowdidge and Bob Carragher took on the responsibility of the co-op, vowing to breathe life back into the empty co-op. Shortly thereafter, Eric Anderson joined the pair to ensure the co-op's survival. The new vehicle of choice: a 1978 Chevy Impala. With the new leadership came a new name: Chez Bob."
From the credits page: "The allocation of the current grad student lounge, in combination with the enthusiasm of the new management ensuring an uninterrupted flow of empty calories into department members' happy stomachs. Everyone rejoiced. Yay!"
From the credits page: "Under the watchful eye of Bob Carragher and Eric Anderson, Chez Bob became a fixture of the CSE Department. During this period, the folks who ran Chez Bob discovered that Costco would deliver shipments of sufficiently large size. The selection of goods steadily expanded to include more snacks, more drinks, and frozen foods, and spending topped $1,000 each month. A recent excavation effort yielded a piece of a vintage Chez Bob cabinet, which our advanced artifact dating techniques have shown probably originated from this era."
A very legitimate article documents some very legitimate happenings at Chez Bob.
The 1993 "All CSE Fall Beach Party and Bar-B-Que" occurs at Kellogg Park at La Jolla Shores, and is sponsored by Chez Bob. Presumably, other parties happened during these years under similar circumstances; however, we seem to mainly have documentation of this one specific party, so—as historians faced with the Sisyphean task of documenting these parties—we must come to the conclusion that this was probably a pretty good party. We also must come to the second conclusion that if you type out "party" six times in a paragraph then it stops sounding like a word.
From the credits page: "Darren Atkinson, Jeremy Sussman, and Chris Vogt all had a hand in running Chez Bob during this period. Capstone achievements during these expansion-minded years included:
From the credits page: "Paul Blair and Adam Taylor ran Chez Bob."
From the credits page: "Alan Su began running Chez Bob."
From the credits page: "On this date, the first version of B.o.B. 2k (Bank of Bob 2000) was deployed in the grad lounge, using an AMD K6 233MHz linux machine. The initial version of the software was a single Perl script making calls to the dialog(1) command line utility for creating user interfaces. Balance information is stored in a PostgreSQL database. Thanks to CSEHelp (for the machine) and the UCSD GSA (for the monitor)."
From the credits page: "Having more or less successfully weaned the department's current users of the system from the legacy 'index card' accounting system, all Chez Bob users were now proud owners of B.o.B. 2K accounts. Students, staff, and faculty who joined the department after this date have never had the joy of tracking their co-op balance on cute little colored index cards."
From the credits page: "Sadly, the initial chezbob.ucsd.edu machine became unstable, due to a combination of a failing disk and bad memory. So, chezbob.ucsd.edu was 'upgraded' to a Pentium 90 MHz linux machine with 64 MB of memory. As of 9/1/2002, this is the current configuration."
From the credits page: "An intrepid CSE 210 (Software Engineering) group consisting of Michael Copenhafer, Wesley Leong, Seth Delackner, Cuong Pham, and Yunfeng Fei decided that the existing Chez Bob interface, in concept and implementation, lacked purity. Together with the Chez Bob management and Prof. Bill Griswold, this group of students set out to change the face of Chez Bob. Aside from greatly improving the readability and maintainability of the code, a barcode reader was added to the system, and a sound card and speech synthesizer was included to give Chez Bob a voice ( ). Finally, an innovative web interface was added. This system was dubbed B.o.B. 2001.
Concurrent with the new B.o.B. 2001 system, the job of running Chez Bob was formally split into several roles and incorporated into the CSE-GSA. With the help of the CSE-GSA, Chez Bob should continue to flourish and provide the department with research-inducing food and beverage."
From Stefan Savage: "During the modern period there has been an over representation of sysnet students running Chez Bob including Michael Vrable, Neha Chachra, Joe Deblasio and Gautam Akiwate (I'm sure I forgot at least one person)."
Our best Chezstorians are still working on chronicling the history of this era. Let us know if you have information to add here!
From Stefan Savage: "The Chez Bob soda machine (recently retired) I purchased in 2005 on exchange for a promise that it would have a finger print reader (donated by then faculty Serge Belongie) whose company (Digital Persona) sold them. It involved the efforts of scores of staff to purchase, drew the ire of no less than four Vice Chancellors and only was obtained through the skill of Don Peters-Coville (RIP) who got the manufacturer (Vendo Corporation) to change the invoice to be not for a vending machine but an 'experiential graduate research project apparatus' (which did not trigger ire).
The original software and hardware for the Chez Bob soda machine was built by Mikhail Afanasyev. I think Neha Chachra introduced the Wall of Shame which used to appear on the 3rd floor monitor."
From the CSE-GSA Chez Bob history page: "The first code change in four years added ability to buy espresso from Bob. Thanks to... whom?"
Explanation from Stefan Savage: "The Chez Bob espresso machine from 2005 was donated by Alex Snoeren (in turn part of a bribe Geoff Voelker and I put together to help convince him not to take a job at CMU)."
A flurry of articles (CNET, CR80News, NetworkWorld, ScienceBlogs, a bunch of people on Slashdot, ...; thanks to Stefan Savage for the links) are published about "the most over-designed soda machine in the world," which as it so happens was (until 2020) a beloved fixture of Chez Bob. The Discovery Channel even did a segment on the machine. (The soda machine's facial recognition UI is documented here, under the digital auspices of Tom Duerig.)
