Coffee pot watching was an important time saver for the 15-strong academic team who worked across several floors.
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Quentin Stafford-Fraser and Paul Jardetzky created the webcam for the entirely practical purpose of preventing team members from being disappointed when they visited the coffee pot. “There were about fifteen of us involved in related research and, being poor, impoverished academics, we only had one coffee filter machine between us, which lived in the corridor just outside the Trojan Room,” Stafford-Fraser recalls . “However, being highly dedicated and hard-working academics, we got through a lot of coffee, and when a fresh pot was brewed, it often didn't last long.” With several team members in other parts of the building, some needing to traverse several flights of stairs to reach the coffee pot, XCoffee was devised as a solution.
The Archimedes mentioned in the intro wasn’t the first host for the Trojan Room Coffee Pot camera; that was an unnamed Motorola 680X0 machine. The Acorn RISC computer took over webcam duties less than eight years prior to the switch-off in 2001.
This webcam has a history going even further back, though. Remarkably, the Trojan Room Coffee Pot webcam was live even before the World Wide Web was a thing. It began service in 1991, when a 128 x 128 pixel grayscale camera was connected to the science lab’s LAN via a frame capture card . An image of the coffee pot was captured three times a minute and via a custom-coded server-side X Window System protocol app so that any team member on the network could monitor/check it. This pioneering webcam actually connected to the internet for the first time in November 1993, just a few months after web browsers gained the ability to display images.
Today, webcams can be used to broadcast very high-quality streams with high resolutions and supporting very fast data and frame rates. Great capture hardware, fast computers, and fiber internet are widespread now, so if you wanted to live-stream a coffee pot, it would be a cinch to do so in true color, in up to 4K, and 60 frames per second using one of the best webcam picks of 2026 .
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Key considerations
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Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/peripherals/webcams/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/peripherals/webcams/the-worlds-first-webcam-was-switched-off-25-years-ago-today-128×128-grayscale-feed-predated-the-world-wide-web-to-monitor-a-cambridge-coffee-pot#main
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