Getting a potato to power a clock is a popular high school chemistry project. The website Spud Server purported to take this concept a step further by using potatoes to power an internet server.

Visitors to the site (which loaded extremely slowly) could marvel at their interactive participation in such a technological feat. The site reached the peak of its popularity in March 2000 when both USA Today and the BBC, among others, ran stories about it.

A few days later the media had to admit that they had been taken for a ride. Spud Server was a joke created by Temple ov Thee Lemur, a nonprofit net company. But Steve Harris, one of the hoaxers behind Spud Server, noted that while their site was a sham, the concept itself was technically feasible.

Inspired by this thought, Fredric White later tried to create an actual, working spud server. He brought it online in June 2000. However, he didn't use potatoes to power the entire server, only the server's cpu. As White noted, powering the entire server would have required over one thousand potatoes. White eventually abandoned his experiment in potato-powered computing after growing sick of the smell of rotting potatoes.