The developers of Spudserver say that their homepage, called Temple ov thee Lemur, is served by what they believe to be the world's first vegetable powered web server. Spudserver is a stripped down low power consumption PC.

Due to memory limitations and the desire to minimise load, Spudserver currently only serves a couple of pages. This may be improved in time, (perhaps by adding more potatoes?)

They say they did this project because "someone bet us we couldn't."

The developers note that once you remove the fans and the floppy and hard disk drives, a PC doesn't require much power at all. They find that on average a dozen potatoes work fine, and that in testing, they once got it running for an hour on three spuds. The potatoes are usually changed every couple of days.

Spudserver runs on a low-power Intel 386 chip with a stripped version of the Linux Kernel, blown onto a ROM, along with the server code and Webpages. The number of browsers accessing the page per minute are limited to conserve power.

According to a report by BBC News Online internet reporter Mark Ward , one potato generates about half a volt, and that potatoes can be used as batteries because the flesh of the vegetable acts as a very thick electrolyte - like the acid in a car battery.

Zinc and copper electrodes are inserted into the potatoes, whose salty flesh serves as an electrolyte for the flow of ions from one electrode to another.

You can try to visit Spudserver at:
http://totl.net/Spud/

(be patient; they may be down for a potato change)

Charles W. Moore

  

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