Researchers at Cambridge University's Computer Laboratory, tired of walking to the Trojan Room only to find the coffee pot empty, rigged a camera to capture a low-resolution image of the pot several times a minute and displayed it on office computers over the internal network. When the World Wide Web arrived a few years later, the feed was placed online, making it one of the first webcams ever seen worldwide.
The problem was mundane: researchers on different floors kept trudging to the coffee machine only to find it empty, a small but genuine irritant in the daily rhythm of academic life. Quentin Stafford-Fraser and Paul Jardetzky rigged a used camera, a video digitizer, and some custom software so that anyone on the lab's local network could check pot status from their desk without moving an inch.
When the image was later hooked up to the nascent World Wide Web in 1993, it became an unlikely global sensation, one of the very first live camera feeds anyone outside a research lab had ever seen, and people from Japan to California tuned in just to watch a pot of coffee slowly drain and refill. The feed ran for nearly a decade before being switched off in 2001, at which point the camera itself was auctioned for several thousand pounds to a German magazine, a strange monument to the internet's earliest, weirdest instincts.
Key people: Quentin Stafford-Fraser, Paul Jardetzky