Invent a webcam to drink coffee

Follow the caf é (Wechat official account vdailycom) and found that Beautiful Cafe opened a small shop of its own.

According to the BBC

(BBC) reported that when the world is troubled by ubiquitous surveillance cameras, do you know how the world's first webcam was invented? It all started with two scientists who wanted coffee.

In 1991, the University of Cambridge computer Research Center only had a coffee maker in the main computer room, and scientists from other rooms often went to the main computer room to find that the coffee was gone. To solve the problem of a wasted trip to pour coffee, scientists Fraser and Paul have a crazy idea: assemble a device that can monitor the coffee pot in the main computer room. They first pointed a Philips camera at the coffee maker, set up three photos per minute, and then wrote a program to send the camera pictures to the research department's internal network. As a result, Cambridge University successfully installed the world's first webcam.

On November 22, 1993, the real "Internet camera" was born. Also in the computer research department of Cambridge University, another scientist Johnson's laboratory was not connected to the internal network and could not use the previous monitoring software to see if there was coffee. So he wrote a program to enable his computer to receive camera images, achieving a breakthrough in the camera from the internal network to the World wide Web.

Since then, millions of people around the world have joined the Coffee Pot watching event via the Internet. In 2011, computer scientists in Cambridge finally shut down the legendary "webcam" because the equipment was too old to be maintained.