History
The camera was installed on a local network in 1991 using a video capture card on an Acorn Archimedes computer. Employing the X Window System protocol, Quentin Stafford-Fraser wrote the client software, and Paul Jardetzky wrote the server. When web browsers gained the ability to display images in March 1993, it was clear this would be an easier way to make the picture available. The camera was connected to the Internet in November 1993 by Daniel Gordon and Martyn Johnson. It therefore became visible to any Internet user and grew into a popular landmark of the early web.
At 09:54 UTC on August 22, 2001, the camera was switched off when the computer department moved to their new premises. The pot (a German Krups model, actually the fourth or fifth seen online) was auctioned on eBay for £3,350 to Spiegel Online, the Internet version of the German Der Spiegel magazine. Coverage of the event included front-page mentions in The Times of London and The Washington Post, as well as articles in The Guardian and Wired.
After being refurbished by employees of Krups free of charge, the pot has been switched on again in the editorial office of Spiegel Online.
Read more about this topic: Trojan Room Coffee Pot
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of the Victorian Age will never be written: we know too much about it.”
—Lytton Strachey (1880–1932)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“One classic American landscape haunts all of American literature. It is a picture of Eden, perceived at the instant of history when corruption has just begun to set in. The serpent has shown his scaly head in the undergrowth. The apple gleams on the tree. The old drama of the Fall is ready to start all over again.”
—Jonathan Raban (b. 1942)