FogCam’s 25-year run has meant that it outlasted another of the web’s earliest webcams. Cambridge University’s coffee pot cam came online a year earlier in 1993, after one scientist who worked at the university wanted a way to check the status of a coffee pot remotely, rather than risk turning up and discovering it empty. “It didn’t vary very much,” the scientist, Quentin Stafford-Fraser, told BBC News back in 2012, “It was either an empty coffee pot, or a full one, or in more exciting moments, maybe a half-full coffee pot and then you’d have to try and guess if it was going up or down.”
—Jon Porter, in “The world’s oldest webcam is shutting down after a quarter of a century”
Published to write.house by Bix Frankonis. Comments and replies by email are welcome.