For a long time, it has both bugged and bemused me that, though the first webcam ran for 10 years taking photos of our departmental coffee pot, there are almost no original images saved from the millions it served up to viewers around the world! I had one or two.
Then, suddenly, in a recent conversation, it occurred to me to check the Internet Archive’s ‘Wayback Machine’, and, sure enough, in the second half of the coffeepot camera’s life — from 1996-2001 — they had captured 28 of its images. I wrote a script to index and download these, and turned them into a slideshow, which you can find in my new and very exciting three-minute video:
RSS feed
Nice! I was at uni from 1991-1994, and I remember when JANET became JIPS (Janet over IP service) and XMosaic was a thing, one of places we looked at was the coffee pot! To be fair, there wasn’t much else on the web then, but it was better than gopher! There was only one other place I regularly checked: a new group called alt.os.linux, which was announced on comp.os.minix đŸ˜‰
Ah yes, I remember downloading two floppy disk images, which were probably on alt.os.linux, and booting them up. (It needed two floppies if you wanted X Windows.)
One other thing I did in the Trojan Room, right next to the coffee pot, was to find a spare PC with a hard disk(!) and I was able to install Linux on that… I think it might have been the first time it was used in the Lab…
I remember my Dad showing me the coffee pot webpage. We thought the black image meant it wasn’t working, until it dawned on us that it was the middle of the night on the other side of the world in the UK. Somehow those black pixels seemed just as impressive as seeing a pot of coffee!
You must have been fairly early, Pete! I think it was someone from Australia who alerted us to this problem at one point, after which we usually had an anglepoise lamp pointing at it!
Is this a statistically significant sample? It certainly reflects my recollections of the time: rarely was there ever as much as 1/2 a cup of coffee to be had. We might conclude that there were few coffee altruists around…
Hi Ed,
Ah, well, I had moved on by this point and didn’t return to the Lab until many years later. Perhaps, after 1996, there was a better set of alternative coffee sources available?
Or perhaps the advent of the camera meant that fresh coffee vanished more quickly, so a random sample was more likely to show an empty pot?
But I suspect a key factor is that, once it gained international reknown and was viewed regularly by people in other timezones, there was an anglepoise lamp pointed at it… which means that many of the images may actually be taken in the middle of the night.
Best,
Q