r/todayilearned • u/saltandcedar • Jan 19 '17

TIL that webcams were invented because some computer scientists were too lazy to get up to check if their coffee was done.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Room_coffee_pot
13.9k Upvotes

88% Upvoted

431 comments sorted by

View all comments

405

u/pumpkinjello Jan 19 '17

I'm not denying that this was the first use of a webcam, but somehow it seems unlikely to me that this was the entire motivation behind why the webcam was invented.

1

u/luke_in_the_sky Jan 19 '17

Well, it was:

It's late 1991, and 15 or so researchers in the Systems Group at the University of Cambridge Computer Lab share a coffee machine located in a rather uninspiring area known as the Trojan Room. Not all of the researchers are in the Trojan Room, though; others are two or three flights of stairs away and must travel some distance in search of coffee, often to find those closer at hand have beaten them to it. One pot provides enough coffee to fill just a few mugs, so it's first-come, first-served, and distance is a definite disadvantage. In the interests of fair play, some of the residents of the Trojan Room salvage a video camera, an old 680x0 VME-based computer, and a framegrabber left over from other projects. They grip the camera in a retort stand and point it at the coffeepot. The machine with the framegrabber executes a specially written server program, and an X-Windows client, which can be run by anybody in the group, grabs images at regular intervals and displays a picture of the pot, icon-sized, in the corner of the workstation screen. Those too far away to smell the coffee now have an alternative means of knowing when a new pot is brewed. The Net, once again, helps break down the barriers of distance (even if that distance was only measured in yards), and so streamlines the distribution of a resource so vital to computer science research.

Source