I used to travel a lot, but like so many others, I’ve been grounded since March 2020. I even miss airports. To combat the lack of visual stimulation while working from home, I’ve been tapping into a different live webcam per day—mostly scenes from Tokyo, or the one peering over Times Square. It’s not an immersive, VR experience, but having the livestream open on my second screen while I work is a nice diversion.
According to industry estimates, the global webcam market totaled $6.69 billion in 2020, with a projected growth rate of 8% in the next decade, most of which will be for 24/7 security requirements. And it all traces back to a single coffee pot at Cambridge University.
When Dr. Quentin Stafford-Fraser hooked up the world’s first webcam in 1991, it was to check whether the coffee had finished brewing at Cambridge’s computer science lab. He still serves as a part-time researcher at the lab, and is now CEO of software development consultant Telemarq, but we tracked him down to see if he still has a live webcam open in a browser tab.
In 1993, I was a junior reporter on a UK newspaper, fiddling around with the then-newfangled Mosaic browsernewfangled Mosaic browser with the also-new HTTP and IMG tags, which permitted images in a web page. I came across a GIF that refreshed every few seconds showing a coffee pot in a computer science lab in Cambridge, UK, a total Douglas Adams-styleDouglas Adams-style this is the futurethis is the future moment. Please take it from there. [QSF] The story starts a couple of years earlier, in 1991, actually. Caffeine has long been recognized as a requirement for good computer science, ever since the days when you had to book time on a mainframe and slots were often only available late at night. So you needed to stay awake or you’d forfeit your network slot. Those times had long passed, but the coffee pot—which brewed truly terrible coffee, but it was all we had—was still crucial to the smooth running of our research group.
With so many of you, I’m guessing that many were disappointed to find it empty when they approached the area.[QSF] Right. The coffee was only palatable at all if you got it fresh, so those who weren’t in the same room as the machine had a significant disadvantage. But our research group had been exploring ways of handling multimedia on computer networks. It was pretty cutting-edge at the time, and we had some equipment left over from an earlier experiment. We rigged up a CCD video camera on a retort stand and connected it to a computer with a video-capture card. (There weren’t really any digital still cameras available then.) A friend and I created a server program for our operating system and it captured the images periodically. Then we built a quick X-Windows app which connected to it using our special network stack and protocols, and displayed a little icon-sized image.
How long did it take to rig up this setup?[QSF] I think the whole project took about one afternoon, though it was only possible because of all the research that had been going on in the group for years. Anyway, it meant we could all just glance at a corner of our screens, wherever we were in the lab, and see the state of the coffee pot, which gave everyone a chance of getting it when it was freshly brewed.
This would have been a grayscale image, right? How many pixels?[QSF] Yes, grayscale, but we joked the coffee was pretty gray anyway. Probably about 120 pixels square.
What kind of computing power setup did you have back then?[QSF] Initially, we had a rack of VME single-board computers and ran it on one of those, but after a while we switched out the hardware to an Acorn Archimedes computer.
For two years it ran on a closed network. Tell us how the coffee pot then became famous on the nascent World Wide Web.[QSF] Well, as you mentioned earlier, in 1993, HTML had just gained the IMG tag, and people were starting to include static images in their web pages: diagrams of their research, the logos of their academic institution, and even pictures of pets and loved ones. Mind you, it was much harder to get those in digital form back then. Remember, we didn’t even have mobile phones, let alone ones with cameras in!
Anyway, we were wondering what would happen if, when a browser asked for an image, it didn’t get back the same one every time. We didn’t know what would happen, because the standards for lots of things we take for granted now, like control over browser caches, hadn’t yet been thrashed out. But we did have a source of constantly changing images—the coffee pot camera—so we could try it out. My colleagues Dan and Martyn modified the server so it could also respond to HTTP requests, and in November 1993 it went live, and the first webcam was born.
Geek history was made. Everyone in the world, not just in the lab where you worked, could see if the coffee pot was freshly brewed. [QSF] Yes, it turned into a popular meme on the early web, long before “meme” was ever used in that context. It was extraordinary. Part of the attraction was the wackiness of using rare and expensive equipment to do something so fun and trivial.
Would you say there was also something else going on too?[QSF] There was something a bit deeper here too, I think. Up to that point, almost everything you’d seen on the web was static and predictable; when you went back to a web page, you knew it would probably be the same as when you last visited. But here, after burrowing through a world of electronic links, you kind of popped out into the real world again, at a place you’d never visited before, and saw what was happening there right now. For most people, up to this point, seeing a live image of any remote location required a large broadcasting company to have parked a big truck there first. Ours may not have been very compulsive viewing, but it was a start!
It was definitely another of those digital culture moments, akin to when the internet was switched onwhen the internet was switched on.[QSF] We had no idea of its significance at the time, but people all over the world have tracked me down to interview me over the decades since.
And then came the day when The Coffee Pot Cam got turned off.[QSF] Yes, that was in August 2001. The lab was moving to a new location and we decided that it had probably served its purpose. But by that point it was well known, and the decision was front-page news on both the London Times newspaper and the Washington Post. The last image sent from the web server was all of our fingers pressing the terminate button at the same time.
The coffee pot still lives, but it’s no longer at the lab? [QSF] It was bought by Der Spiegel magazine, and I believe it’s still in their office in Germany. I don’t think they’ve used it, though. They probably have better taste in coffee! So do we, now. The sale bought us a good machine and enough coffee to last us for ages.
Finally, we have to ask, do you have any open browser windows on your computer right now, with a webcam feed?[QSF] Ah, well, yes, actually I do, but it’s nothing exotic. One of my hobbies now is home automation; I’m a big fan of an Open Source project called Home Assistant, which allows me to connect up huge numbers of devices around the house and do interesting things by combining them. And, as it happens, some of those devices are cameras. At the moment I have six of them looking out at the garden, the driveway, and over the surrounding fields. Six! At home!
It is extraordinary how far we’ve come.[QSF] Can you imagine what we’d have thought of that back in 1991?
