Trojan Room Coffee Machine

Site:
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/coffee/coffee.html

Category:
The Internet

Review (in 1996):

This is simply 24-hour, 365-day-per-year video coverage of the coffee pot in the University of Cambridge Computer Lab in England. The shot is updated once per second for instant transmission around the world. If you have to ask why, you're just not getting into the spirit of the Web.

To be honest, the original intent was to let the building's denizens check the pot before climbing two flights of stairs to the coffee room. Once the local computers were hooked up, the site leaked onto the Net, and the coffee pot became a celebrity in its own right. (No movie deals so far, however.)

This was one of the earliest of the silly Web cams, and somehow it's still compelling.

As reviewed in the 1996 "World Wide Web Top 1000" - a review of the Top 5% of all Web Sites in 1996.