In the early 1990s Quentin Stafford-Fraser and Paul Jardetzky, both University of CambridgeThey had a problem that was as ordinary as it was annoying. They needed coffee, abundant and rich coffee, to cope with long working days, and their building had only one coffee machine, spread over several floors, serving the workers.

When Stafford-Fraser, Jardetzky, or any of the other researchers in computer science at the University of Cambridge arrived in the room where the carafe was located, they noticed that the coffee was missing, leading to outrage and anger. frustration. Nothing that doesn’t happen frequently in other offices even today, it just launched in 2024.

If Stafford-Fraser and Jardetzky’s case is special and has entered the tech history books, it’s because they weren’t willing to go without caffeine. Experts used their computer knowledge and built what is now considered the first webcam on the planet; This pioneering device… Absolutely!, was created to monitor the coffee machine. it wasn’t empty.

All for some coffee

This chapter dates back to the dawn of the 1990s, when the World Wide Web was “little more than a twinkle in CERN’s eye,” as Stafford-Fraser would recall years later. The specialist was working in the Troy Room, part of the center’s Computer Laboratory, with Jardetzy and other colleagues who had to share a coffee machine located outside the room.

Not only that. While it was bad to organize with other department colleagues to guarantee a caffeine supply, Stafford-Fraser and Jardetzy were forced to share the device with colleagues in offices on other floors of the building, people who had no other option. I had no choice but to run up and down the stairs to get to the damn machine.

“We around 15 Because we were poor, impoverished academics, we only had one coffee filter machine for everyone, which was located in the hallway, just outside the Troy Room,” says Stafford-Fraser. “Some worked in other parts of the building and had to walk long distances. I was walking down the stairs to reach the coffee machine; This journey was often fruitless.

Solution? Use your mind.

Stafford-Fraser and Jartdetzky decided to leverage their technical knowledge and come up with a solution that was both simple and looked great. So much so that we still remember it today, over thirty years later, and it is often cited as the birth of a tool as popular as webcams.

“We fixed the camera to a stand, pointed it at the coffee machine in the hallway, and ran the cables under the floor,” Stafford-Fraser told IFL Science. The invention basically consisted of a 128×128 pixel grayscale camera, complete with a server program that captured images of the discord coffee machine every few seconds. various resolutions.

The last image taken by the camera.

They were then tasked with creating a program that any of their colleagues could run, connect to the server, and display an icon-sized image of the coffee machine at the bottom of the screen. Cleaner, water for coffee.

The BBC states that the camera captures images three times a minute. The XCoffee program was born. But there was another equally interesting chapter in the development of webcams; This section was not written by another expert, researcher and caffeine lover until 1993: Martin Johnson.

Johnson was not connected to the Cambridge laboratory’s internal network, so he could not receive updated images of the status of the famous Troy Room coffee machine. Excited by curiosity, he researched the server code. “I created a little script around the captured images,” he recalls: “The first version was 12 lines of code, probably less, and copied only the latest image to the requester.”

On November 22, 1993, an image of the coffee machine appeared on the World Wide Web. What it showed was a grainy grayscale image of a coffee pot that might be full, empty, half-full, or half-empty, depending on the size of the coffee pot. There was nothing exciting or fast-paced, but it was interesting enough to become a great little phenomenon in Internet history. As the BBC recalls, over time millions of tech fans from around the world logged on to see the strange coffee machine that turned Cambridge upside down.

“Sometimes I think nothing I’ve ever participated in again would have had such an impact, and this was just a crazy idea that came up one afternoon,” Stafford-Fraser explained to the British network in 2012. Checking Cambridge’s coffee stocks with that primitive camera became a more or less popular practice by the late 2000s. August 2001 Those responsible decided to disconnect.

If you try to access the broadcast on the University of Cambridge’s website, you will see a message with the final image from the webcam along with a blurry image in which a hand can be seen. “The Trojan Room Coffee machine was shut down at 0945 UTC on Wednesday, August 22, 2001,” it explains.

“The software was becoming unsustainable,” Johnson said. Not bad for a solution developed by a few researchers to publish for ten years eager to drink coffee.

Meanwhile, the coffee maker was auctioned and sold for price: a magnificent little gem of computer history. In the tender, 3 thousand 350 pounds, neither more nor less, was offered for this, that is, approximately 3 thousand 800 euros.

Images: Early Bird Coffee And Wikipedia

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