This sounds fake.
Cambridge put a coffee pot on the Web. People around the world watched.
People checked a live camera to see whether walking over for coffee was worth it.
The part that checks out ↘
It really happened.
In 1991, researchers at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory shared one filter coffee machine. To save colleagues a wasted walk, they pointed a camera at it and sent a small image of the pot across the lab’s network. Later the picture was put on the World Wide Web — and people around the world started checking a coffee pot in Cambridge.
One of the founding images of the live, networked camera was not surveillance or broadcast. It was a very human question: is there any coffee left?
No folklore. Actual sources.
- 1 The Trojan Room Coffee Pot — a (non-technical) biography
First-hand account of the 1991 camera and its move to the Web.
cl.cam.ac.uk
- 2 The Trojan Room Coffee Machine
The original service page; the pot predates the lab’s web server.
cl.cam.ac.uk
- 3