The Trojan Room coffee pot was the inspiration for the world's first webcam

Webcam

A webcam is a video camera that feeds its images in real time to a computer or computer network, often via USB, ethernet, or Wi-Fi.Their most popular use is the establishment of video links, permitting computers to act as videophones or videoconference stations. This common use as a video camera...

. The coffee pot was located in the so-called Trojan Room within the old Computer Laboratory

University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory

The Computer Laboratory is the computer science department of the University of Cambridge. As of 2007, it employs 35 academic staff, 25 support staff, 35 affiliated research staff, and about 155 research students...

 of the University of Cambridge

University of Cambridge

The University of Cambridge is a public research university located in Cambridge, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest university in both the United Kingdom and the English-speaking world , and the seventh-oldest globally...

. The webcam was created to help people working in other parts of the building avoid pointless trips to the coffee room by providing, on the user's desktop computer, a live 128×128 grayscale

Grayscale

In photography and computing, a grayscale or greyscale digital image is an image in which the value of each pixel is a single sample, that is, it carries only intensity information...

 picture of the state of the coffee pot.

History

The camera was installed on a local network

Local area network

A local area network is a computer network that interconnects computers in a limited area such as a home, school, computer laboratory, or office building...

 in 1991 using a video capture card on an Acorn Archimedes

Acorn Archimedes

The Acorn Archimedes was Acorn Computers Ltd's first general purpose home computer to be based on their own ARM architecture.Using a RISC design with a 32-bit CPU, at its launch in June 1987, the Archimedes was stated as running at 4 MIPS, with a claim of 18 MIPS during tests.The name is commonly...

 computer. Employing the X Window System

X Window System

The X window system is a computer software system and network protocol that provides a basis for graphical user interfaces and rich input device capability for networked computers...

 protocol, Quentin Stafford-Fraser

Quentin Stafford-Fraser

James Quentin Stafford-Fraser was instrumental in the creation of the Trojan room coffee pot: the first webcam. He wrote the XCoffee client program which allowed the state of the coffee pot to be displayed on a screen....

 wrote the client

Client (computing)

A client is an application or system that accesses a service made available by a server. The server is often on another computer system, in which case the client accesses the service by way of a network....

 software, and Paul Jardetzky wrote the server. When web browsers gained the ability to display images in March 1993, it was clear this would be an easier way to make the picture available. The camera was connected to the Internet

Internet

The Internet is a global system of interconnected computer networks that use the standard Internet protocol suite to serve billions of users worldwide...

 in November 1993 by Daniel Gordon and Martyn Johnson. It therefore became visible to any Internet user and grew into a popular landmark of the early web.

At 09:54 UTC on August 22, 2001, the camera was switched off when the computer department moved to their new premises. The pot (a German

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

 Krups

Krups

Krups is a German kitchen appliance manufacturer, named after its founder Robert Krups.It is often confused with the Krupp conglomerate.The company also produces a large variety of household appliances...

 model, actually the fourth or fifth seen online) was auctioned on eBay

EBay

eBay Inc. is an American internet consumer-to-consumer corporation that manages eBay.com, an online auction and shopping website in which people and businesses buy and sell a broad variety of goods and services worldwide...

 for £

Pound sterling

The pound sterling , commonly called the pound, is the official currency of the United Kingdom, its Crown Dependencies and the British Overseas Territories of South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands, British Antarctic Territory and Tristan da Cunha. It is subdivided into 100 pence...

3,350 to Spiegel Online, the Internet version of the German Der Spiegel magazine. Coverage of the event included front-page mentions in The Times

The Times

The Times is a British daily national newspaper, first published in London in 1785 under the title The Daily Universal Register . The Times and its sister paper The Sunday Times are published by Times Newspapers Limited, a subsidiary since 1981 of News International...

of London and The Washington Post

The Washington Post

The Washington Post is Washington, D.C.'s largest newspaper and its oldest still-existing paper, founded in 1877. Located in the capital of the United States, The Post has a particular emphasis on national politics. D.C., Maryland, and Virginia editions are printed for daily circulation...

, as well as articles in The Guardian

The Guardian

The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...

and Wired

Wired (magazine)

Wired is a full-color monthly American magazine and on-line periodical, published since January 1993, that reports on how new and developing technology affects culture, the economy, and politics...

.

After being refurbished by employees of Krups free of charge, the pot has been switched on again in the editorial office of Spiegel Online.

Other mentions

• The coffee pot is spoofed in the video game Hitman 2: Silent Assassin
  Hitman 2: Silent Assassin
  Hitman 2: Silent Assassin is a stealth game developed by IO Interactive and published by Eidos Interactive. Released for the Xbox game console on September 30, 2002, it is the second entry in the Hitman series and the sequel to Hitman: Codename 47...
  
  . In one mission, "The Graveyard Shift", the player can cause a much-needed distraction by destroying a "coffee camera" in the kitchen.
• The coffee pot is referenced in the protocol specification for the Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol
  Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol
  The Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol is a protocol for controlling, monitoring, and diagnosing coffee pots.HTCPCP is specified in the jocular RFC 2324, published on 1 April 1998. Although the RFC describing the protocol is an April Fools' Day joke, it specifies the protocol accurately enough...
  
  , proposed in the April Fools' Day
  April Fools' Day RFC
  Almost every April Fools' Day since 1989, the Internet Engineering Task Force has published one or more humorous RFC documents, following in the path blazed by the June 1973 RFC 527 entitled ARPAWOCKY, which parodied Lewis Carroll's nonsense poem Jabberwocky...
  
   RFC 2324.
• The coffee pot was mentioned on the BBC Radio drama The Archers on Feb 24th 1995. Clip on Quentin's site.

Further reading

• The Life and Times of the First Web Cam: When convenience was the mother of invention, Communications of the ACM
  Communications of the ACM
  Communications of the ACM is the flagship monthly journal of the Association for Computing Machinery . First published in 1957, CACM is sent to all ACM members, currently numbering about 80,000. The articles are intended for readers with backgrounds in all areas of computer science and information...
  
  , Vol.44, No.7, pp. 25-26, July 2001.
• Internet Archive of the site
• New coffee pot webcam at the offices of Spiegel Online

External links

• Trojan Room Coffee Machine
• Final image at 09:54 UTC on 22 August 2001
• More Trojan Room Coffee Pot resources on Quentin Stafford-Fraser's site