World's First Webcam, the Trojan Room Coffee Pot, Switched Off 25 Years Ago

The End of an Era

The world's first webcam, known as the Trojan Room Coffee Pot, was permanently deactivated on Wednesday, August 22, 2001. This marked the end of its 10-year service at Cambridge University. The final image captured by the low-resolution camera depicted its own switch-off, with Daniel Gordon, Martyn Johnson, and Quentin Stafford-Fraser pressing the power button on the Acorn Archimedes computer it was connected to.

Practical Origins

Quentin Stafford-Fraser and Paul Jardetzky developed the webcam to solve a practical problem: preventing researchers from making wasted trips to an empty coffee pot. The team of about fifteen academics shared a single coffee filter machine, and fresh pots often did not last long. To avoid disappointment for colleagues located in different parts of the building, the XCoffee system was created.

Pre-Web Innovation

The Trojan Room Coffee Pot webcam began operation in 1991, predating the World Wide Web. 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 per minute and made accessible to team members on the network through a custom-coded server-side X Window System protocol application. The webcam first connected to the internet in November 1993, shortly after web browsers gained image display capabilities.

Technological Evolution

The initial host for the camera was a Motorola 680X0 machine, with an Acorn RISC computer taking over duties less than eight years before its decommissioning. Modern webcams offer high-quality streams with high resolutions, fast data, and frame rates, supported by advanced hardware, powerful computers, and fiber internet. Today, live-streaming a coffee pot could be done in 4K resolution at 60 frames per second with true color.