Computer technology has evolved so very fast it's hard to remember life before the internet. 26 years ago at the beginning of the nineties, 1991 to be precise, the fledgling world wide web had no search engines, no social networking sites, no cryptocurrencies and definitely no webcams.
One of the things that's very, very important in computer science research is a constant and dependable flow of caffeine," explained James Quentin Stafford-Fraser. Frazer is a computer scientist and entrepreneur based in Cambridge, England. He was one of the team that created the first coffee pot webcam.
So why was the worlds first webcam invented? For what profound reason or possible experimental research? No no.... It's to make sure no one fucks with the coffee!!! And now we have internet history and content gold :-)
So the problem for these chaps was that the coffee pot was stationed in the main computer lab, AKA the "Trojan room", and many of the researchers worked in different labs and on different floors." As you could imagine they would often turn up to get some coffee from the pot, only to find it had all been drunk and put back empty,"
To solve this problem, Dr Fraser and another scientist, Dr Paul Jardetzky, rigged up a camera to monitor the Trojan room coffee pot at all times. The camera would grab images at a blistering three times a minute. They wrote some crafty software that would allow fellow researchers in the building to run the images from the camera on their internal computer network . Eventually word got out, and before long millions of tech enthusiasts from around the world were streaming the Trojan room coffee pot as it became known.
The actual Trojan room coffee pot was reported sold at auction - predictably over the internet for £3,350. It was bought by Der Spiegel news magazine in Germany. I am sure they pressed the pot back into active service :-).
You will notice there is a lot of black and white imagery going on here, I cant help but think, was it that long ago?Now I feel old! Here is the actual news broadcast on the BBC news those many years ago, in full Technicolor respectably.
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