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The Very First Webcam Was Invented to Keep an Eye on a Coffee Pot at
Cambridge University
in Food & Drink, History, Technology | September 14th, 2021 1 Comment
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[INS::INS]
The internet as we know it today began with a coffee pot. Despite the
ring of exaggeration, that claim isn't actually so far-fetched. When
most of us go online, we expect something new: often not just
something new to read, but something new to watch. This, as those of
us past a certain age will recall, was not the case with the early
World Wide Web, consisting as it mostly did of static pages of text,
updated irregularly if at all. Younger readers will have to imagine
even that being a cutting-edge thrill, but we didn't really feel like
we were living in the future until the fall of 1993, when XCoffee
first went live.
This groundbreaking technological project "started back in the dark
days of 1991," writes co-creator Quentin Stafford-Fraser, "when the
World Wide Web was little more than a glint in CERN's eye." At the
time, Stafford-Fraser was employed as one of fifteen researchers in
the "Trojan Room" of the University of Cambridge Computer Lab. "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."
[INS::INS]
It occurred to Stafford-Fraser to train an unused video camera from
the Trojan Room on the coffee pot (and thus the amount of coffee
available within), then connect it to a computer, specifically an
Acorn Archimedes. 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."
[lazy_placeholder][Screen-Shot-2021-08-30-at-17]
XCoffee, the resulting program, was meant only to provide this
much-needed information to Computer Lab members elsewhere in the
building. But after the release of image-displaying web browsers in
1993, it found a much wider audience as the world's first streaming
webcam. 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. (He'd previously worked at the Olivetti Research
Laboratory, whose parent company also owned Acorn Computers.) "We
could see things at a distance before," he says. "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.
via BoingBoing
Related Content:
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London & Beyond
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Passersby Separated by 376 Miles to Interact in Real Time
George Orwell Predicted Cameras Would Watch Us in Our Homes; He Never
Imagined We'd Gladly Buy and Install Them Ourselves
The Coffee Pot That Fueled Honore de Balzac's Coffee Addiction
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The Most European Car Accessory Ever Made
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities,
language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter
Books on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through
21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema.
Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
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by Colin Marshall | Permalink | Comments (1) |
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[INS::INS]
Comments (1)
You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently
not allowed.
* Marc r Plante says:
September 15, 2021 at 7:07 am
Followed closely by Spam cam that chronicled the degeneration of
blocks of SPAM compared to competing inert substances. It was
like watching grass grow in reverse.
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