cross-posted from: https://lemmy.capebreton.social/post/327322
The Trojan Room coffee pot was a coffee machine located in the Computer Laboratory of the University of Cambridge, England. Created in 1991 by Quentin Stafford-Fraser and Paul Jardetzky, it was migrated from their laboratory network to the web in 1993 becoming the world’s first webcam.
To save people working in the building the disappointment of finding the coffee machine empty after making the trip to the room, a camera was set up providing a live picture of the coffee pot to all desktop computers on the office network. After the camera was connected to the Internet a few years later, the coffee pot gained international renown as a feature of the fledgling World Wide Web, until being retired in 2001.
It went offline on August 22nd, 2001
I didn’t even know we had digital webcams in 1993, and I was very much alive at the time.
Edit: Haha I just did some more reading, these WERE the people who invented the first webcam. They literally created one just to watch this pot.
Fun fact: Kodac had digital cameras back in the 1970s - this was declassified a few years ago. I used to know someone who flew Vulcans in the RAF, he always told me he was testing prototype Kodac long range photography at the time.
Kodac invented it and predicted the shift to digital but execs buried it because it wouldn’t be good for their film business.
Yep, people in Rochester were pissed to learn this. Instead of riding the wave, Kodak execs turned the company into a donkey.
Fwiw, the digital cameras they invented were rather garbage. Most were up until a couple decades ago and didn’t even really become serviceable until about 10-15 years ago.
But Kodak never wanted to get into the digital business and did everything they could to stop it. They made most of their profits from selling film and the equipment and chemicals to develop them.
Digital camera tech can be traced back to the 60s. Used in satellites.
Fijifilm and Kodak were both creating CCD tech in 1975 for military, hosiptals and aerospace when the Cromemco Cyclops released to consumers the same year.
The first colour consumer digital camera was by Sony in 1981.
The first commercially manufactured webcam was released by SGI in 1993, the Indycam for the Indy workstation, the same year the coffee pot went public on the web.
There were small scale video calling systems around even before that, although they weren’t based on web/IP technologies.
Wild. The first digital camera I remember was that goofy looking one from Apple, the QuickTake, around …94? 95?
So this was like longest stream in history
I really love shit like this, feels like the golden age of computers and the internet
This is the end of an era, and I’m honestly kinda bummed. I’m still sour about Geocities being decom’d, but I’m just a grumpy old man.
Not to worry, the era ended 22 years ago.
:s/is/was
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2324
That had to have some part in the inspiration for rfc2324
Between this and the CMU soda machine, The Internet used to be so geeky
https://www.tutorialspoint.com/early-internet-of-things-the-world-s-first-iot-deviceThe pioneers of computing have a lot history of (mis)using their systems in fun ways.
A favourite story of mine is the developers at Sun Microsystems creating the PizzaTool software to order pizza from a Unix workstation.
Let’s not forget the Fish Cam. You could press Ctrl Alt F in Netscape and go to a live stream of a fish tank in like 1994
deleted by creator
Wonder if this was part of the inspiration for the condor egg stream on Silicon Valley
That was inspired by an eagles nest in Australia.
Oh yeah, forgot Jared mentions something about the eagle nest
