The first webcam watched a coffee pot at Cambridge
Before browsers showed images, a 128×128 feed of a Cambridge coffee pot saved researchers a three-flight walk.
In 1991, in the Trojan Room of Cambridge University's Computer Lab, Quentin Stafford-Fraser and Paul Jardetzky wrote a small system called XCoffee. A Philips video camera pointed at the lab's filter coffee pot. Server software shipped a fresh 128×128 grayscale frame every few seconds to anyone on the lab network. The point was to avoid the three-flight walk down to the kitchen only to find the pot empty.
It was not yet on the web. The World Wide Web existed but had no inline images until 1993, when Marc Andreessen's Mosaic browser added the <img> tag. Daniel Gordon and Martyn Johnson wired the coffee pot up to HTTP soon after. On 22 November 1993 the Trojan Room Coffee Pot became the first live webcam.
It ran for ten years. On 22 August 2001 the camera was switched off as the lab moved to a new building. Spiegel Online bought the pot itself at auction for £3,350. Krups, the manufacturer, refurbished it.
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