The first webcam
First Webcam
The first webcam began operating in 1991, the same year as Tim Berners-Lee’s World Wide Web, and had its origins in an even more important topic in computer science: the flow of caffeine around a research group. The group, based in Cambridge University’s computer lab and led by Dr Quentin Stafford-Fraser, had a problem: the coffee machine was shared by others in more distant parts of the building.
“These poor souls would often arrive, mug in hand, to find no fresh coffee,” explains Stafford-Fraser. “So one afternoon, friends and I gripped an old camera in a retort stand and connected it to a spare computer, then wrote a program [known as XCoffee] that allowed anyone in our group to display a live image of the pot in the corner of their screen.
“When, in 1993, web browsers were first able to display images, my colleague Dan Gordon modified the software so that a browser could take the place of our program. As a side effect, the whole world could see the image. Millions did, and so the first webcam was born.” Coffeecam finally shut down in 2001, when the computer science department moved to a new building. More details.
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