watching stuff on the web

Today we can take it for granted that you can watch and/or download video on the web... it wasn't always that way... in fact, there was a time before the web... as amazing as that seems.


Here are a couple of photos of the early days of video on the web. The top photo is from the the very first web cam. And, of course, it is of a coffee pot!! The second is the last transmission of that first webcam as they turn the coffee pot off. [The details are hard to make out, but it shows the fingers of Daniel Gordon, Martyn Johnson and Quentin Stafford-Fraser pressing the power-off switch on the Acorn Archimedes which had captured the images for the preceding 7 years and 9 months.]

For details you can check out the wikipedia article or the Trojan Room Coffee Pot page.

And now there are such exciting and meaningful webcam as: watching grass grow andr watching paint dry.

The coffee pot webcam was a useful tool - why walk down to the coffee room if the pot was empty - wait until someone else makes the coffee before you make the trek!