Please note, this post contains extracts from an interview with Dr. Quentin Stafford-Fraser, all of which are indented.
I’m here in Paderborn, Germany, outside the Heinz Nixdorf Museum, to come and see the first Internet celebrity the world ever saw. So let’s get inside. Let’s get warm. Take a look.
Now this museum is absolutely brimming with incredible things. It claims to be the largest computer museum in the world, and there’s certainly enough here to keep you occupied for days. However, I only had a few hours and a mission to find something that most people would probably overlook.
It’s easy to get distracted in here. There’s a lot to see. But after walking around a bit, I finally found it. Here it is. It’s a coffee pot.
But this wasn’t the original location of this fairy innocuous looking coffee pot. It’s not even the right country.
It was here, at the New Museum’s site, at the University of Cambridge.
This building then, was the original location of what would be known as the Trojan Room Coffee Pot, where the former computer lab was housed, in the Arup Building, built in 1969 specifically to house the lab1. Nowadays it’s called the David Attenborough Building, and is a hub for biodiversity and conservation. So, to chart it’s story, we need to first venture to the new Computer Lab, housed in the William Gates Building a short journey to the West of Cambridge, where I’m meeting Quentin Stafford Fraser, one of the men responsible for creating this global sensation.
This might be a more modern building, but Quentin was keen to show me a lot of interesting old tech that has made it’s way here, from parts of EDSAC II, to an entire relic cupboard, filled with vintage treasure. Naturally I was was more than happy to take a look at before sitting down and delving into this story.
Interview with Quentin Stafford-Fraser
Hello, so I’m Quentin Stafford-Fraiser, and we are in the, now technically, the Department of Computer Science and Technology in the University of Cambridge, but it’s always been known as the Computer Lab, to those of us who’ve been here for a long time. I’ve here on and off for a very long time because I was an undergraduate student here, and then I did a PhD, and I worked for the lab, and then I came and did some research here. On and off, I’ve been in the department for a long time, but it wasn’t always in this building. This building is relatively new and dates from about the millennium, I think. But before that, we were in an older building in the centre of Cambridge, which had been around for quite a long time and was really not a very beautiful building. It was a very impractical building It was a tower that had won lots of architectural awards but let the rain in. We were in a research group that was spread over several floors in this tower, and we were working on things like multimedia over computer networks. This was back in the early ’90s, and it wasn’t really clear just how computer networks would do at transmitting multimedia.
Could we do broadcast quality television over a computer network. That was something that really was quite challenging at the time. The particular research group I was in was looking at various different forms of computer networks. It was back when Ethernet was just starting to take off, but it certainly wasn’t clear that Ethernet was going to be the standard that took off, and so we were looking at ATM networks. That’s nothing to do with cash machines. That is Asynchronous Transfer Mode, which is a different way of sending packets of information over networks, and it has some real advantages if what you are doing is, say, a stream of video. So we were looking into this and there were various people doing their PhDs. I was just a research assistant at the time, but they were doing their PhDs into things like how you might store video on disks, how you might retrieve video, large corpaces of video from disks, how you might transmit it over the network and be able to guarantee a certain amount of quality and so on. So we had quite a lot of kit hanging around, things like cameras and frame grabber cards and disks you could store things on.
And so there was a lot of this multimedia kit available to us, which actually wouldn’t generally have been there for other people. So this group consisted of quite a few people, and many of us worked in a single room that was called the Trojan Room. We had a habit of naming big computers after various classical references at the time. So there was the Trojan and the Titan. We were in the Trojan Room. Several of us were literally in that room, but some people were in rooms across the corridor or up a flight or two of stairs, so on. One thing we had in common, though, was we all shared this coffee filter machine. It wasn’t very good coffee in the department at all. In fact, the coffee in the department was pretty appalling. We had marginally better coffee, which we had from just a very standard, cheap filter machine. But even that was it was only really drinkable at all if you got to it while it was fresh. Now, that was nice and easy for me because I sat right next to the coffee machine, and so I always got fresh coffee.
I always knew when it was full. But not everybody in the group did, and they would often come down three flights of stairs only to discover that the coffee pot was empty or that it had been sitting there for a long time. And so a friend and I decided we could do something to make the situation more equitable because coffee has always been a a very important part of computer science research. You have to give programmers a good stream of coffee to keep them working productively. This dates back from the days when, often, to get time on the mainframe, you would be up in the middle of the night, and so coffee was even more important. We didn’t have that problem, thankfully. What we did was we found a camera, this camera, actually, which was left over from one of our previous experiments, and we connected it to one of the special purpose computers we had been using for our network research. Now, back in the day, a camera that you could connect to a computer was a very rare and a very expensive thing. It was pure fluke that we had to have such things lying around and available to us.
We gripped it in a retort stand and pointed it at the coffee pot. And I wrote a bit of software with my friend Paul Jardetsky, he wrote the server side, the bit that captured the images. And I wrote a little client programme which could display in the your screen a picture of the coffee pot. What that meant was that if you didn’t sit right next to it, you could just glance down at the corner of your screen and immediately see whether it was worth going down three flights of stairs to see if there was any coffee in the pot or not. If you watched it, you could even get an idea of whether it was fresh or not. You could wait until someone else had done the hard work of filling it up and then you could run down and get fresh coffee.
The Coffee Application…
This original application was called xcoffee, running on MIT’s X Window system and spurting out grainy 8 bit monochrome images 3 times a minute, which actually improved to 768×576 images fairly rapidly. But, really this was the first instance of a stream, or webcam running over a network, and it was enough to be featured in a Communications Week article in January 1992, after columnist Bob Metcalfe visited the lab.
He wrote “Quentin and Paul wrote XCoffee so that while sitting at their networked workstations they can see the coffee pot shared with colleagues in the lab’s office tower. The computer laboratory is littered with cheap video cameras as a result of its Pandora Project (which I will report on soon). They commandeered a spare camera and aimed it at the coffee pot from a rack-mounted video-frame-grabbing 68020 server… XCoffee is the best network appliance hack I’ve heard about since the Simple Network Management Protocol-managed toaster demonstrated at Interop a year ago.”2 ~ we can talk about that a different time.
What did you Write it in?
I think the software would have been written in C, probably. The first version would have been using libraries that we had built for our other multimedia work. But most of us were using Hewlett-Packard workstations. It was a project that was sponsored by Hewlett-Packard at the time. They would have been running HP-UX, I think, the Hewlett-Packard version of Unix. But the computers that this was actually connected to and the things we were doing research on, were running our own operating system called Atmos, because we were looking at asynchronous transfer mode, ATM networks. Atmos was the name of the operating system. But we could also run it on a variety of other hardware, like Acorn Archimedes. It was very, very basic as video goes. It was refreshed, I think about three times a minute, but that was fine because the coffee pot filled up very slowly. It turned out this was exceedingly useful, and everybody in the group ran this. It was far more useful than anything else I did while I was working in that group. This was a camera that was connected to a network, and a server was capturing the images from the camera and making them available to other people on the network.
But this was before the World Wide Web, so it was actually about the same time as the web was starting.
Other XApps?
Soon after Bob Metcalfe’s visit there were suggestions of an XSandwichVan and XPrinterOutputTray app, but the hardware for the original frame grabber would actually die before anything else had a chance of life. However, in March 1993, the NCSA Mosaic browser incorporated a few more features that made things a little more interesting, and so, Quentin, along with Daniel Gordon and Martyn Johnson looked at opening up the coffee pot to more than the computer lab3.
Early Internet Browsers…
The early web browsers could only display text. You could do a few things like change the colour of the text or the size of the text or lay it out in different ways, but you couldn’t, for example, include images. But a couple of years later, about 18 months later, in 1993, web browsers started to get the image tag. They got the ability to display images, and people would use them to put the logo of their organisation or the crest of their university or even a picture of their results, or sometimes even a picture of their girlfriend. But usually, fairly static images on what in general, were very static pages at the time. So a friend and I were talking about this, and we wondered what would happen if when the browser goes to the server and says “could I have this image to go on my web page” suppose the server didn’t give back the same thing every time. We didn’t know what would happen. The whole set of caching directives that are built into HTTP and HTML now didn’t exist back then, so we really weren’t sure what would happen. We thought, where have we got a stream of constantly changing images that we could do some experiments with?
Oh, well, how about the coffee pot? A couple of my friends modified this to capture the image periodically and make it available over this new thing called HTTP. That meant that you didn’t have to run my special software anymore. You could use one of these newfangled web browsers, and you didn’t have to be running our special networking stack, which understood the ATM networking protocols, you could just use an ordinary PC. And so using a web browser, you could see how much coffee there was available in our coffee pot.
The Acorn Archimedes Steps up
By November of 1993, the system, armed with a new frame grabber and running from an Acorn Archimedes 310, the very same that can now be seen in the lobby of the William Gates building, got to work, pumping out an image every 3 seconds on this new glorious super highway, although actually, given the constraints of most people’s internet connection, the image was actually a lower resolution than the original internal network.
Getting Images on the Web
Up until that point, very few people had see live images from anywhere else in the world. It’s very easy to forget this now when we can all do it from our phones. But if you saw live TV from somewhere back then, it was because the BBC or some big broadcasting company had taken an enormous outside broadcast van and had parked it outside Wimbledon or somewhere and were streaming with lots of staff with big cameras. Whereas here, after browsing through lots of static pages on the web, you might suddenly stumble across this little square which was a live image of a part of the world you had never been to and probably never would go to, but you didn’t know when you went to that page what you would see when you got there. It was this little window into a reality somewhere else. I don’t want to make this sound bigger than it was, but that’s why it was unusual. Also, there really weren’t very many web pages on the web at the time. The fact that this was expensive and complicated kit, which we were using for something as trivial as monitoring a £20 coffee filter machine had a bit of wackiness about it that I think captured people’s attention at the time.
One of the first TV crews that came to visit us came from Japan, Actually, this was the other thing I mentioned, that actually it became a global thing, whereas it hadn’t been in the past. The first time we really realised this was when we got emails from somebody complaining that he had to look at our web page and all he saw was a black square. It took us a while to click that his email address was in Australia. We didn’t get that much email from other parts of the world at the time. And so whenever If he went to look at it, we were all in bed and the lights were off. One of the first things we actually had to do was get an Angle-poise lamp pointing at this thing so that it was permanently illuminated, not because we needed that for the coffee, but because of all the people who wanted to look at the coffee pot in the middle of the night. We had people turning up. I remember one couple who turned up at Cambridge Tourist Information asking if they could see this coffee pot camera. The tourist information people who were just down the road worked out that it was something to do with computers.
And so they said, well, there’s a computing department just up the road. You could go and ask them. And so sure enough, they came. I forget where they were visiting from. I think it was the States. They were able to come and have a cup of coffee from the coffee pot that they had only seen previously from thousands of miles away. So it was quite fun.
The Media Frenzy Ensued
Despite the basic nature of its webpage and indeed, the subject matter itself, this humble little coffee pot really did capture attention around the globe. Japan, being a culture that quickly adopted webcams jumped on the chance to go and film this piece of developing history. So, the middle of 1994 saw not just Cambridge’s coffee pot, but also a young Quentin Stafford-Fraser himself, broadcast into Japanese households. Here you can see the original camera at work, along with, the then coffee pot sitting on a rather British floral tray. Quentin then shows the number of visits per week increasing fairly rapidly on this graph.
With the coffee pot technically becoming the most visited tourist attraction in the region, Anglia News would feature a segment in 1996, with the BBC’s look East following in 1998, highlighting a world where webcams were now starting to become common, showcasing everything from bus stops to the notorious JenniCam; the first web-based “lifecaster”.
In fact, it became a bit of a meme. Professor Philip Watson, from the University of Texas, decided to use the pictures from a single day to test of MPEG encoding4, whilst the Internet Engineering Task Force published an April Fool’s Day RFC entitled Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol5, outline rules for coffee pots on the web, stating “There is a strong, dark, rich requirement for a protocol designed espressoly for the brewing of coffee”6
But whether it was local news, or international, the coffee pot spread everywhere through TV, newspapers, and even in an episode of the famous BBC Radio 4 show, The Archers…. and the ZDTV Network. This reached a climax in 2001, when the coffee pot, and it’s live stream would meet it’s end. Well, temporarily at least.
Quentin Talks About Turning off the Pot
We started this work in 1991, as about the time the web started. In 2000, 2001, somewhere around then, we knew we were going to be moving to this building. This had always the Trojan Room coffee pot camera. One thing that wasn’t going to be around anymore was the Trojan Room. We thought that as it had been running for about 10 years, it was probably time to decommission it. We used to joke at the time about internet years being like dog ears, that seven years of normal time could be condensed into one year on the internet. This camera was 70 years old. It had its three score years and 10, and we thought it was probably about time to switch it off. The most publicity it ever got, actually, was when we decided to turn it off. This was about the time that other companies were thinking they were really trendy by announcing they had a website, and we would say, we’ve done that. It’s passed. We turned it off after 10 years. But as a proof, in a way, of the fact that things happened really fast on the early Internet, in 10 years, this had gone from being a real novelty to being an historic artefact.
People had nostalgic feelings about it. They remembered the early days of the web. Well, it was on the web for about seven years, I guess. It really hadn’t been around long. But when we decided to switch it off, this became a big story. In one week, I was quoted on the front page of the London Times and the Washington Post. I’ll never do anything else that gets this publicity. But it was an indication that this was well enough known that the Washington Post would put on the front page. It seems crazy now, but it was interesting that, yes, back then, you could really get attention by turning off a website rather than starting one up. We used various different cameras at different times. I think this was the very first one, though, because if I look back at the early images we had, it’s always got this one in it. I think this was the first webcam. But what we did go through rather more were coffee pots, because coffee pots weren’t very well used and they didn’t last very long. Over 10 years, they needed replacing fairly regularly. But the one, I think, that survived for the longest on one of the other cameras was bought in the end by Der Spiegel magazine in Germany and lived in their office in Germany for quite a while.
They bought it on this new thing called eBay. For, I think it was about $5,000. £3,500. £3,500, yeah, which bought nice coffee machines and lots of coffee for the department. The coffee got a lot better after we actually got rid of the coffee pot camera. This is a historical Artefacts now, which is in a museum in German. I have a feeling it was a Krupp’s coffee machine, and Krupp’s themselves actually fixed it up so that it- That’s a German company. It’s a German company, and they fixed it up so that it was working. I believe that’s correct. It actually went back to the manufacturers to get reinstated. It wasn’t necessarily the very first one, but it was the longest serving of the Trojan Room coffee pots. Yes.
The Der Spiegel Years
And indeed it was a Krups Coffee Pot, to be precise, a Krups ProAroma 305 Coffee Pot78, whose German engineering clearly made it better value for money than some of the earlier examples, including rival manufacturer Braun. Final news stories put the total number of visitors at some 2.4million, with visitors around the world lamenting the end to this iconic corner of the web.
This then, is the final image of the coffee pot showing the fingers of Daniel Gordon, Martyn Johnson and Quentin Stafford-Fraser turning off the Acorn Archimedes, with coffee updates now on pause for the entire world.
But interest did not die. eBay being founded in September 1995, was already one of the biggest sites on the internet by 2001, with 22million registered users, pushing 79.4million auctions per quarter. Perfect for selling off this historic item of interest. So it was, in August 2001, that the Krups coffee pot was listed, drawing huge attention. The Cambridge Coffee Club, as they came to be known9 were expecting bids to not exceed £300, but as the 11th August 2:39pm deadline loomed, the final bid of £3350 came through10, equating to just under $5000 at the time, or 10,500 Marks. Holding on until the end, it was the German magazine Der Spiegel that came out victorious11, thanks to sponsorship from the healthcare group Fresenius.
Arriving on its floral tray with the UK plug cut off, the Krups machine, having been in near constant use since 1997 at that point, had a leaking water tank and was deemed a fire hazard. Spiegel described the metal tray as having millimeter-thick brown black coffee stains11, however, to sweeten the deal, Cambridge would also send their original coffee grinder, desk lamp, and of course, the Philips CCD camera being used at the time. They even sent the 19 inch rack that the machine was standing on during its final years.
All of this kit was then used to setup the “Trojan Room Coffee Museum”12. A very noughties online virtual experience, where visitors could learn about the coffee machine’s history, check out the “coffee fun” area, and even view the coffee pot in it’s new environment. Now with the added ability to change camera! Yeah, we had TWO webcams now that could be moved left and right!
Der Spiegel only used the pot for a few months, before it was transferred to a storage room, and kept as an ever streaming artefact of the early internet. People could log on and view the pot in complete comfort knowing it was the one constant in their life, with the Der Spiegel building proudly illuminated in the background. Sometimes it would even have something inside the pot, like a rubber duck. Sometimes it was in pitch darkness, that old desk lamp seemingly no longer considered necessary, and sometimes it was dressed for the occasion, or sponsorship deal.
During this time, the coffee pot camera continued to pervade culture, even appearing as a reference in Hitman 2: Silent Assassin6. Around the world many other webcams came and went, including Toilet Cam, Ken’s Freezer Cam and Feet Cam. Whilst the coffee pot, and indeed the ever charismatic Quentin, appeared in further news stories, including when the BBC looked back on the first 20 years of the web.
The coffee pot and it’s story seemed like it would be around forever. But, by 30th June 201613, it was gone. The Der Spiegel page still existed, but the feed did not. That one constant; the coffee pot was no more. It had left us, just like everyone else. We should never have trusted it.
*dark silence*
The Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum Years
But it’s ok, because it just ended up here. Proudly donated to the Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum and on display since October 2016.
Situated on the second floor, away from the museum’s coffee shop at the entrance, and among other artefacts in the illuminated internet wall, including an a Telekom Viewdata terminal, an old PC and modem, some old mobile phones, a NeXTcube, even some cabling.
As you approach the Coffee Pot, it illuminates for all to see, with a nearby display that talks about it’s history, and provides early images from the Cambridge webcam. It even provides a QR code so that you can see, the currently hooked webcam in action, although for some reason it wasn’t actually working when we were there.
But fear not, because by simply typing in this address, you can return to the comfort, security and stability of the coffee pot, whenever you like, and as long as it’s working, you can once again be at peace, now in full colour, full motion video. It’s somewhat ironic, that it was very likely more stable in the 90s that it is today.
Which leaves one thing for us to do. Return to the room where this all started.
A room, which now, well, it’s literally a coffee room, for students and staff to hang out in. It has a kitchen and set of automated coffee machines. But rather fittingly, in the corner, we found this.
A single, lone, old style coffee machine, which perhaps is a small tribute to what came before. Or more likely, just a coffee machine for those to like to drink by the pot.
Until next time, I’ve been Nostalgia Nerd. Toodleoo.
Patreon subscribers. You can get access to vlogs of both the Museum and the Cambridge Computer lab, along with the full, unedited interview with Quentin, right now. As ever, thanks for watching and thanks for your support.
Nostalgia Nerd is also known by the name Peter Leigh. They routinely make YouTube videos and then publish the scripts to those videos here. You can follow Nostalgia Nerd using the social links below.
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