The first webcam was invented to keep an eye on a coffee pot

#39 · 🔥 295 · 💬 119 · 2 years ago · www.openculture.com · elorant · 📷
The internet as we know it today began with a coffee pot. "Being poor, impoverished academics, we only had one coffee filter machine between us, which lived in the corridor just outside the Trojan Room. However, being highly dedicated and hard-working academics, we got through a lot of coffee, and when a fresh pot was brewed, it often didn't last long." His colleague Paul Jardetzky "Wrote a 'server' program, which ran on that machine and captured images of the pot every few seconds at various resolutions, and I wrote a 'client' program which everybody could run, which connected to the server and displayed an icon-sized image of the pot in the corner of the screen. The image was only updated about three times a minute, but that was fine because the pot filled rather slowly, and it was only greyscale, which was also fine, because so was the coffee." Stafford-Fraser's successors "Resurrected the system, treated it to a new frame grabber, and made the images available on the World Wide Web. Since then, hundreds of thousands of people have looked at the coffee pot, making it undoubtedly the most famous in the world." Stafford-Fraser wrote these words in 1995; in the years thereafter XCoffee went on to receive millions of views before its eventual shutdown in 2001. In the Centre for Computing History video above, Stafford-Fraser shows the very Olivetti camera he originally used to monitor the coffee level. "We could view television programs, we could look through telescopes." But only after the Trojan Room's coffee pot hit the internet could we "See what's happening now, somewhere else in the world," on demand. Thirty years after XCoffee's development, we're mesmerized by live-streaming stars and surrounded by "Smart" home appliances, hoping for nothing so much as way to concentrate on our immediate surroundings again - to wake up, if you like, and smell the coffee.
The first webcam was invented to keep an eye on a coffee pot



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