Skip to content
Loading page

Started by Ayodele Bankole (@ayo_archives) ·

the first webcam was pointed at a coffee pot

Cambridge researchers put a camera on the coffee machine in 1991 so nobody made the trip to an empty pot. It started as a 128×128 greyscale feed on the lab network, went on the web in 1993, and then people all over the world were watching a coffee pot in England. It was switched off in 2001.

7 sources · 31 min down the hole

How I got here

Started with
“first webcam ever”
Ended at
“is http 404 named after a room at cern”

The Trail

  1. “first webcam ever” (google.com)
  2. Trojan Room coffee pot (en.wikipedia.org)
  3. Trojan Room Coffee Pot Biography (cl.cam.ac.uk)
  4. Webcam (en.wikipedia.org)
  5. Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol (en.wikipedia.org)

    and then someone wrote an april fools spec for controlling coffee pots over HTTP

  6. RFC 2324: Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol (HTCPCP/1.0) | RFC Editor (rfc-editor.org)

    where '418 I'm a teapot' comes from

  7. “is http 404 named after a room at cern” (google.com)

    nope, apparently a myth

Keep going