--- F R E N D Z of martian --- ----- 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 ----- -- Sent to you via the frendz list at marsbard.com The archive is at http://www.mail-archive.com/frendz@marsbard.com/