This is a little single CCD camera.

It took black and white images.

Not in very high resolution, as I recall, it was probably might have bean 500 pixels across that sort of number, maybe 700.

It might have been a PAL signal, but but we didn't often actually use it to that resolution because storing that kind of quality of image and transmitting it was a bit hard on the on the network's most of the networks of the time.

So this was 1991.

The Web was just starting about then.

First, few Web browsers were around, but not very many people knew about him at this point on Dhe.

I was working in three university computer that were in the university computer lab here now, or the Department of Computer Science and Technology is, it's now officially called.

But in those days it was in a much last year, building over in the center of town on Dhe.

I was part of a group that was working on multimedia over computer networks.

Back in those days, we didn't know how good this could be networking standards were still being developed.

We didn't know whether Ethan Ayer Tor a T M or token ring or someone's going to be the one that one.

We were looking at things like How good of frame round, high or higher quality.

How much color can you get?

Could you do broadcast quality video over computer networks?

We didn't know that at the time, So a lot of people in the group were working on how you create this sort of stuff, how you transmit it, how you store it, how you process it in real time.

So and that meant that we had various fund bits of multimedia kit lying around in a way that really wasn't very common at the time on dhe.

But we that there's also something that was very important for computer science research has always been important for computer science research on dhe.

That's a good flow of coffee.

This state's, I think, partly back to the time when you had the book, you know, time on the mainframe late at night.

And so, um, you know, you needed the coffee to keep you awake while you were working, but we computer scientists get through a lot of coffee.

And we had this particularly bad coffee machine in the lab in those days, and it was shared between about 15 of us working in this group, and most of us worked in the same room, so the coffee pot was right there.

It was a sort of filter drip machine thing on dhe.

It never made very good coffee, but it particularly didn't make good coffee if it was stale.

If it had been sitting there for some time and you didn't get it when it first came through the filter, it was really bad.

So some of us worked in that room.

But some people in the group worked in rooms down the corridor or even two or three floors up, and they would often come down and they wouldn't have.

We felt they didn't have fed, you know, fair share of access to the fresh coffee, and, uh, and because we had some bits of kit lying around like little cameras, that we could actually connect to computers, cameras that you could connect to computers were pretty rare in those days.

This was actually the 1st 1 we used.

We grip this in a kind of retort.

Stand on, Dhe pointed it at the coffee pot on my friend Paul Jr.

Jetski wrote a little bit of software on one of our dedicated machines in the rack that would capture images from this once every we captured them about once every 10 seconds or something.

Maybe maybe faster than that, I don't know.

But Andi, I wrote a little app.

This was at the time and X windows app that would display a little icon sized image of the coffee pot.

He run my app and it would appear in the corner of your screen.

That meant that people who particularly people who weren't nearby, could just glance down, see what the state of the coffee pot waas and know whether it was worth the trip downstairs around the corner or whatever to get to get a fresh cup on DA.

It was built on some experimental RPC protocols we were using at the time you had to be running our special networking stack on Dhe, but it'll work very well, and we threw it together very quickly, not because we were particularly brilliant, but because a lot of guys in the group had been doing their PhDs or other research on this for some years.

And so we had a lot of the tools there to take images from cameras on and on and put them in, get them into computers on interestingly, of course, it was video that we were getting out of the cameras in those days.

Digital still cameras, actually, decent ones didn't come along for quite a while after that.

But we did have video cameras, which would output a video signal.

And then you would have a frame grab a card, which would capture individual frames on, turned into memory and turn those back into video in the computer.

And they were about three frames a minute, or something that we actually displayed in the little window of the app, which was fine because the coffee pot filled up very slowly and empty fairly slowly, so that would give you sufficient data for your coffee making decisions.

And they were also grayscale images.

But we Egypt that that didn't matter because the coffee was pretty grey as well, and so this was sufficient.

So it was a sort of disruptive view of the video everyone else in the group, including me, had been working on.

What's the best quality, the best resolution, the best color you can get on?

We discovered that it was actually also really useful to point a camera at an inert object on get.

I think it was about 120 pixels square, maybe even less than that in gray scale, low frame rate video that actually could still serve a useful purpose.

In 1993 Web browsers started to get the ability to display images.

Before that, you could display text.

You could change the size a little bit.

You could change the color.

I think it could change the background of the page, but you couldn't really d'oh, you know very much more than that on then the image tag in HTML, which let you embed images, started to come into the Mosaic browser in early 93 Spring of 93.

I think on we thought all this is interesting.

What would happen if the browser went to the Web server and said, Please give me this this image.

The server didn't give back the same image every time we didn't know what the browser have cashed it.

Would it get confused?

Would it only ask once because up to that point, most people had just bean using images to show graphs of their results or pictures of their girlfriends or the logos of their institution usually, and it was all very static.

So we thought, Where have we got a source of constantly changing images?

Ah ha, the coffee pot camera.

So my friends Dan Gordon and Martin Johnson took this stuff that was coming out of here and was using our own RPC protocols and network stacks and so on and just quickly bolted on a thing that let it be access.

There's a probably a gift, actually over, Http.

This new http protocol It worked very nicely and we could create a little Web page, and it meant that people in the group did not have to be running our specific networking stack and my particular little AP and so on.

They could just go to one of these new fangled Web pages on dhe.

See how much coffee was in the coffee pot, which was good, but as a side effect, it meant that everybody in the world could also see how much coffee was in our coffee pot on DDE.

We didn't realize this, but it turned into quite, you know, initially, we never knew this would be this would happen.

But it turned into quite a novelty, quite a popular novelty.

We call it to mean now, I guess on the on the early Web, because back in those days there were really weren't very many things to look at on the early Web.

And I think we're still talking about a time when browsers didn't even have bookmarks, favorites, menus because there were so few sites out there that you could, you know, you could remember the one city to the U.

R L's of the things he wanted to look at.

So you're browsing around on.

All of a sudden, you came across this page where a group had done this crazy thing of taking what was then a very valuable bit of technology on dhe, pointing it at this rather grotty looking coffee pot simply so they could get fresh coffee and that kind of court people's imagination.

And it became something of an icon in the early days of the Web.

Eventually we did decide however, that it had run its course on it was time to turn it off.

And so we turned the camera around and pointed it at the computer that had been taking all of these images over the years on the very last image this captured Waas all of our fingers pressing the off switch of the computer that had been running it for those 10 years.

That computer that was turned off ceremoniously was it.

Was it the same one all the time?

And was it saying capture card or had had to make changes?

And we I think it was changed once the very, very first software ran on.

We had.

We had these racks of single board computers plugged into a V M E bus.

For people who remember those kind of things they were, they were designed specially for this project.

Mostly one or two of them were standard.

But as I recall, it was a board about this size that had a frame.

Grab a card alongside it on, and this was connected into the frame.

Grab a card on dhe and the software ran on there under our own operating system on DDE After a while that hardware proved somewhat unreliable, and we ended up switching to an R comedian.

So I think for most of its life it was on our committee's computer than actually captured the image.

But this was another recently turned it off.

After 10 years, the number of people around you even remembered the operating system that we were running and the and knew how the software worked, and so on was getting quite small in it.

You know, it needed to be repaired a few times and so on.

We usedto joke in the early days that things happen so fast on the Web that it was sort of like dog years.

You know, one year on the Web was seven years in real life, and it was kind of fun that this went from being a novelty to being a Where did this whole webcam thing start to being historic artifact to being something that people pined for when it was being switched off because of their, you know, nostalgic memories all in a 10 year period, you know, almost nowhere helps him in the world in general, where where things can go from novel teeter toe antique in 10 years, and so that was part of the fun of it.

So sometimes he fall.

Please would dies.

He often would make backup copies.

Let's try this one times more helpful.

And so there's this game called Lander.