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This is an excerpt from The Breakdown newspaper. To read the full article, register.
“Technology is anything that doesn’t work.”
– Danny Hillis
The world’s first web camera was hit by surprise.
Computer scientists at the University of Cambridge lab, to avoid the frustration of walking to the kitchen only to find their coffee pot empty, put together a web app called XCoffee.
A small video camera, installed in the kitchen and connected to the laboratory network via Ethernet, was programmed to send low-resolution images of the coffee pot to the scientists’ desktops every 20 seconds.
It was a new arrangement in 1991 – and when researchers moved from the laboratory to the still world-famous Internet in 1993, it became the world’s first website.
It was also the first way to use the Internet.
The world wide web was a lonely place in 1993, with few pages to browse and no search engines to find.
Somehow, though, people found their way to the coffee shop camera.
These old internet users were eager to take action – everything! – on the Internet who were impressed by the regular appearance of the regular coffee pot.
Is it almost over? Is the coffee getting dark? Does anyone have a cup and I don’t???
It was reality TV at its worst.
It was also a hit.
The opportunity to keep tabs on the Cambridge coffee pot must have spread carefully by word of mouth, because there were no social media to share it, no search engines to find it.
But the pot’s audience grew slowly, with the lab’s servers receiving first hundreds and thousands of visitors – and then clearly: Millions soon people started using the internet to monitor someone’s coffee.
One of the lab’s researchers received e-mails from Japan asking for the kitchen lights to be left on overnight so that people living in different areas could have a chance to see the (potentially empty) coffee pot.
A tourist information office in Cambridge, England has begun providing museum directions to visitors hoping to see the star coffee pot in real life.
Finally, peak coffee pot mania was reached in 2001, when the lab’s decision to remove its webcams was made. front page headlines.
By then, there were plenty of things to do on the Internet, like watching cat videos and loud music – and not later, there would be. all damages things to do like surfing Facebook and posting videos on TikTok.
Nothing could have been imagined in 1993. But the popularity of the coffee pot web cam was the first time that the world wide web became popular: People’s willingness to use the Internet to watch coffee being hot was a clear sign that they would also want to use anything and everything.
This is a sign of innovation: If people are willing to use a new technology when it’s not the best (video at three frames per minute) and for unexpected reasons (watching coffee), it’s a sure bet that great things are coming.
So, there is something on my wish list 2024 2026: Crypto has its coffee moment.
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