22 nov 1993 ano - Coffee: First ever live stream video

Descrição:

The scientists credited with inventing the first webcam - thereby launching the revolution that would bring us video chats and live webcasts - stumbled upon the idea in pursuit of something far more old-fashioned: hot coffee.

As computer geeks at the University of Cambridge beavered away on research projects at the cutting edge of technology, one piece of equipment was indispensable to the entire team - the coffee percolator.

"One of the things that's very, very important in computer science research is a regular and dependable flow of caffeine," explains Dr Quentin Stafford-Fraser.

But the problem for scientists was that the coffee pot was stationed in the main computer lab, known as the Trojan room, and many of the researchers worked in different labs and on different floors.

"They would often turn up to get some coffee from the pot, only to find it had all been drunk," Dr Stafford-Fraser remembers.

Streaming coffee
To solve the problem, he and another research scientist, Dr Paul Jardetzky, rigged up a camera to monitor the Trojan room coffee pot.

The camera would grab images three times a minute, and they wrote software that would allow researchers in the department to run the images from the camera on their internal computer network.

This removed the need for any physical effort to check the coffee pot, and avoided the emotional distress of turning up to find it empty.

However, it wasn't until 22 November 1993 that the coffee pot cam made it onto the world wide web.

"It didn't vary very much," explains Dr Stafford-Fraser. "It was either an empty coffee pot, or a full one, or in more exciting moments, maybe a half-full coffee pot and then you'd have to try and guess if it was going up or down."

Word got out, and before long millions of tech enthusiasts from around the world were accessing images of the Trojan room coffee pot.

Dr Stafford-Fraser remembers receiving emails from Japan asking if a light could be left on overnight so that the pot could be seen in different time zones.

The Cambridge Tourist Information office had to direct visitors from the US to the computer lab to see it for themselves.

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