Trojan Room coffee pot
The Trojan -room coffee maker (English name Trojan Room coffee machine / pot ) was the motivation for the first webcam. The webcam showed in a periodically updated 128 × 128 pixel grayscale image the level of coffee in the hallway outside the so-called Trojan Room of the old computer laboratories of the British University of Cambridge, and could be viewed over the Internet using a web browser. The webcam was set up to save people in more remote parts of the building unnecessary ways to possibly empty coffee pot. Since they equally demonstrated the sense and nonsense of the new World Wide Web, they quickly gained worldwide popularity in this medium.
Operating the camera started in 1991 in the local network of the computer laboratories of the University by means of a frame grabber card in an Acorn Archimedes computer. First, the whole system ran by its own RPC protocol over ATM with a program written by Paul Jardetzky server program and written by Quentin Stafford - Fraser client application called XCoffee for building on the X Window System graphical user interfaces.
As in 1993 was possible to display images directly into web pages, Daniel Gordon and Martyn Johnson could simply distribute the periodically updated images of the camera, since no special software is needed anymore on the clients and the reload the website the integrated image file with a new version automatically could be overwritten and thus updates very easy. Therefore you overtook the camera system and included it in November 1993 to the Internet at. In this way, any Internet users could access with their web browser to the camera, and the first webcam was a popular meeting place in the early World Wide Web.
On August 22, 2001 at 09:54 UTC, the camera was turned off and the coffee maker (a model of Krups ) was auctioned on eBay for 3500 pounds sterling to the messaging platform Spiegel Online. About the shutdown was for example reported on the front pages of the London Times and the Washington Post as well as in articles in The Guardian and Wired. After the Krups coffee maker had been set free repair, the webcam has been taken in the editorial office of Spiegel Online again.
The Trojan -room coffee maker comes in the video game Hitman 2: Silent Assassin ago, where the player can destroy a "Coffee camera " in the kitchen in a mission, and in the Hypertext Coffee Pot Control Protocol, which is described in the April Fool's RFC 2324.