At the beginning of the nineties, the world wide web had no
search engines, no social networking sites, and no webcam.
Scientists at the University of Cambridge were addicted to
caffeine, but the coffee pot was stationed in the main computer
lab and many of the researchers worked in different labs and on
different floors.
They came up with a
solution; set up a camera to grab images three times a minute,
and they wrote software to run the images from the camera on
their entire internal computer network. During 1993 the program
made it to the World Wide Web and millions of tech enthusiasts
from around the world began accessing images of the now famous
coffee pot.