Adapted article! How a coffee pot inspired the development of the webcam!

How a coffee pot inspired the development of the webcam!

The webcam updated the image of a coffee pot thrice a minute

Computer technology moves so fast, it's hard to remember life before the internet. But in 1992, the Web had no search engines, no social networking sites, and no webcam. The scientists credited with inventing the first webcam - thereby launching the revolution that brought us video chats and live webcasts - stumbled upon the idea while pursuing something old-fashioned: hot coffee.

The geeks working at the many offices at Cambridge University shared a single coffee percolator. The coffee pot was stationed in the main computer lab. Often, scientists from other labs and on other floors would turn-up for coffee and find the pot empty. "One of the important things in computer science research is a regular and dependable flow of caffeine," explains Dr Quentin Stafford-Fraser.

To solve the problem, Dr. Stafford-Fraser and Dr Paul Jardetzky, rigged up a small Philips camera to monitor the coffee pot. The camera would grab images three times a minute, and they wrote software that would allow researchers in all departments to run the images from the camera on their internal computer network. This obviated the need for the physical effort to check the coffee pot, and avoided the emotional distress of turning up to find it empty.

In 22 November 1993, the coffee pot cam made it onto the Web. Once again it was a computer scientist, momentarily distracted from his research project, who made the breakthrough. Dr Martyn Johnson was not one of those connected to the internal computer network at the Cambridge lab, and therefore had been unable to run the coffee pot cam software. He had been studying the capabilities of the web and upon investigating the server code, thought it looked relatively easy to make it run.

"I just built a little script around the captured images," Dr Johnson says. "The first version was probably only 12 lines of code, probably less, and it simply copied the most recent image to the requester whenever it was asked for."

The coffee pot attracted 71 bids before selling for £3,350 on auction site eBay in 2001. It was bought by Der Spiegel news magazine in Germany, which pressed the pot back into active service.

Sourced from: http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-20439301