the Trojan Room coffee pot
loreops cultureweb dev
The Cambridge coffee machine whose monitoring camera became the world's first webcam.
In 1991, researchers at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory pointed a camera at the shared coffee pot so nobody would trek to an empty one; when the image went onto the young web in 1993 it became the first webcam, watched by millions worldwide. The feed ran for a decade until the pot was switched off in 2001 and auctioned on eBay to a German news site. The purest origin story in computing: laziness, correctly applied.