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F R E N D Z of martian
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----- Forwarded message from Eric Myers <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> -----
Say Goodbye To The Web's First Star
(http://www.informationweek.com/story/IWK20010307S0008)
The world's first Webcam, pointed at a coffeepot on the Cambridge
University campus, is about to blink off after 10 years of
dedicated service.
The Webcam went online in 1991, when Cambridge computer-science
researchers got tired of walking to another room for a cup of
joe, only to find the communal pot drained. So they pointed a
video frame-grabber at the coffeemaker and wrote a program that
snapped a picture every few seconds and posted it to a server. A
few years later, when the Web was born, they made the images
available there. In those early text-based days of the Web, when
there wasn't much else to look at, it was a huge hit, eventually
drawing around 2.4 million visitors.
But the historic device will be disconnected sometime later this
year, when the lab moves to a new building. For many, it's a
bittersweet moment, because the little image of a coffeepot was
more than just a clever hack. It was one of the first
applications that showed people the Web's potential, and it
inspired many bored programmers to build bigger and better
things. And unlike so many millions of pages on the Web, this one
was actually useful ... at least if you were a computer scientist
in Cambridge jonesing for a caffeine fix.
At deadline, someone needed to make another pot. Take a look for
yourself at http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/coffee/coffee.html
- David M. Ewalt
----- End forwarded message -----
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