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“Technology is everything that doesn’t work yet.”
– Danny Hillis
The world’s first webcam was an unintended hit.
Computer scientists at a Cambridge University lab, to avoid the disappointment of walking into the kitchen to find their communal coffee pot empty, have put together a network application called XCoffee.
A backup video camera, mounted in the kitchen and connected to the lab’s network via Ethernet, is programmed to send low-resolution images of the coffee pot to the scientists’ desktops every 20 seconds or so.
It was a novel arrangement in 1991, and when researchers migrated it from a laboratory network to the still-new World Wide Web in 1993, it became the world’s first webcam.
It also became the first mainstream use case on the web.
The World Wide Web was a lonely place in 1993, with few web pages to look at and no search engines to find them.
Somehow, people found their way to the coffee pot webcam.
These early surfers were very keen to do something – anything! – On the web they find themselves fascinated by the still view of a standard coffee pot.
Is it almost empty? Is the coffee getting darker? Did someone have a cup while I was gone???
It was reality television at its worst.
It was also a hit.
The opportunity to observe a Cambridge coffee pot must have spread strictly by word of mouth, because there was no social media to share it, and no search engines to find it.
But the bowl’s audience grew steadily, as the lab’s servers received hundreds and then thousands of visitors — and then exponentially: Millions Soon more people were using the web to monitor someone else’s coffee.
One of the researchers in the lab received emails from Japan requesting that the kitchen light be left on all night so that people in different time zones could see the (presumably empty) coffee pot.
The tourist information office in Cambridge, England, has begun offering directions to the laboratory for visitors hoping to see the stellar coffee pot in real life.
Finally, the coffee pot craze reached its peak in 2001, when the lab’s decision to permanently disconnect its webcam led to Front page titles.
By then, there were more substantial things to do on the Internet, of course, like watching cat videos and pirate music — and not long after, there would be Completely expendable Things you can do like scrolling through Facebook and posting videos on TikTok.
None of that would have been unthinkable in 1993. But the popularity of the coffee pot webcam was the first indication that the World Wide Web would soon become mainstream: people’s eagerness to use the Web to watch coffee stay warm was a clear sign that they also wanted to use it for anything and everything.
This is the hallmark of great technology: if people are eager to use new technology when it’s not very good (three frames per minute video) and for unexpected reasons (watching coffee), much bigger things are sure to come.
So, here’s something on my wish list 2024 2026: Cryptocurrencies are having their moment.
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