There was even an entire standards document drawn up (as a practical joke), called the Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol (HTCPCP 1.0). To this day though, there the server status response 418 - I'm a teapot still exists. It was defined as part of HTCPCP as the error code returned when you tried to get a teapot to brew coffee :)

Web nerds took their coffee seriously! Or maybe they didn't? Does doing up an entire standards document as an april fools joke count as serious or unserious?

So it wasn't porn?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trojan_Room_coffee_pot

The Trojan Room coffee pot camera existed before the web existed. Before the web it was a client/server protocol on a local network. They only made it into a webcam after the web was invented and started supporting images.

What I remember is that when the first web browsers capable of displaying images were launched, people found a way to sample a single frame from a camera and load it into an image tag to get an extremely slow frame rate camera. People had been trying to make video calling a thing since the 1960s, and I think the first "webcams" were new attempts to demonstrate that. They basically came out at the same time as XCoffee being available on the Internet, but they had more publicity behind them. IMO, what made the coffee pot special was that it was so clearly useless to everybody except a few people in a lab in Cambridge. It was revolutionary that bandwidth and camera hardware was so cheap that someone could allow anybody on the planet to just check out the level of their coffee machine on demand at any time.

You can/could also find Coffee HOWTO in your distro's HOWTO package. (I found a reference back to v0.5 of the document in 1998.)

Has simple schematics to get you started for the hardware, using the parallel port to toggle relays.

It's a very neat little document, and inspired me to write a simple kernel module so I could echo 1 | sudo tee /sys/whatever/coffee0 to turn pin 0 high on the parallel port. (This is silly, and it's much easier to just do things in user space!)

"most world changing technologies were made because an Engineer was lazy!!!!"

-Bill Gates, probably

"Coffee" was also the name of the first OnlyFans model to use a Webcam.

Necessity is the mother of invention

I just love those old OS designs. Mostly Windows 3.11 and AmigaOS 3.2

FYI : Kodak patented the digital camera in 1975 but film and paper were too profitable

Java?

I don't understand why they don't just accept free walks

Too much tech for me, I alway French Press my coffee on the go in a more ecologic way.

At first I thought why not use a float level, then I thought oh right that'll be disgusting to have floating in the shared coffee.

Just use a laserpointer and the surface refracting properties of water, like any hacker?

Hot coffee in your area!

I got a 360° one to fuck with my cat >:)

Me and My 3d printer thank you