Lunchtime Trivia Tuesday, January 14

Q: Video conferencing and online webcams are now a part of our daily lives at work and home.  The very first webcam was used for this purpose.  What was it?

A: To monitor the level of the coffee pot  in the kitchen at the University of Cambridge’s Computer Lab.  People got tired of going all the way down to the kitchen to find the coffee pot empty.

First it was closed circuit then they put it on the World Wide Web.  It became world famous and was retired in 2001

The Trojan Room coffee pot was a coffee machine located in the Computer Laboratory of the University of Cambridge, England. It was the subject of the world’s first webcam, created by Quentin Stafford-Fraser and Paul Jardetzky in 1991.

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.[1][2]

https://t.ly/XXbAu

Image courtesy of University of Cambridge via weird-facts.org