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Trojan Room Coffee Pot
- mastazi 3y agoThe early Internet was magical. The fact that you could see a place through a camera, in real time and whenever you wanted, on the other side of the world, was magical. Before webcams, only large television networks had the technical ability to do that, through an extremely expensive satellite connection. Now, 16-year-old-me could do it from my bedroom.
- xanderlewis 3y agoAnd in 4K! And you don’t even need to be in your bedroom; you could do it from basically anywhere.
- dave78 3y agoIt really was magical. I'll not forget the first time I sent an email. My cousin had just gone to college and his parents were visiting my parents and I. I somehow got his email address at college, and figured out how to send him an email through a BBS I was using at the time. He was apparently in a computer lab then, because he wrote back within minutes. I called everyone in the house over to see the computer screen. The feeling we all had at seeing a nearly-instant response to a message was just magical, especially since it was "free" (a phone call to him would have incurred long distance charges). I imagine it would be difficult for anyone under the age of about 42-45 to imagine just how mind-blowing this kind of thing was at the time. I also remember a similar amount of wonderment a few years later seeing a "live" picture over the internet for the first time as you describe - I believe the first one I found was the Netscape Fishcam. Seeing a live picture on a computer from some other part of the country (or world) was just mind boggling. It all seems routine and even mundane now. I wish I could recapture the sense of excitement the internet had back then.
- mastazi 3y ago> I imagine it would be difficult for anyone under the age of about 42-45 to imagine just how mind-blowing this kind of thing was at the time. Based on your username, I think we were born in the same year :-)
- dave78 3y agoSounds that way!
- simias 3y agoI guess every generation experiences this type of nostalgia for the novelties of youth, but I still feel heavily privileged for having been able to live through the nineties and early 00's and experience the incredible technological explosion that occurred with microcomputers and the internet. I started playing videogames on 8bit consoles and within a little more than a decade we had mainstream internet and games like Half Life 2. Every new generation of consoles and computers blew the previous one completely out of the water. We're also the last generation who knew what life was without having an always-online computer on ourselves at all times. Calling your friends on landlines to ask them if they wanted to hang out! Meanwhile my current desktop computer that I use for work is about 8 years old and the benefits I'd get for upgrading would be relatively minimal. Tech is still progressing massively of course, but it feels like in many areas we've hit diminishing returns.
- dave78 3y agoI suppose earlier generations had telegraph, telephone, radio, TV, airplane travel, rockets, etc. but yes, the rate of change of technology was incredible, to us anyway, in the 80s and 90s. I guess it remains to be seen if AI eventually evokes the same feelings. If not then it almost feels like we're in a bit of a drought since the smartphone revolution 15 years ago.
- actionfromafar 3y agoThis time around, the tech spread faster and more evenly. With the telephone, there were places with no telephone and other places which would have had it for almost a century. Now, cell phones are almost everywhere.
- jyunwai 3y agoThe International Telecommunication Union (ITU) at the United Nations tracks a precise statistic, and includes this updated as part of its annual report—with the most recent report just published this week (I believe yesterday, from the date of the press release). More than three quarters of the population worldwide own a cell phone [1], as "78 per cent of the population aged 10 and over in 2023 own a mobile phone." Split by income level, 94% of high-income individuals, 84% of upper-middle-income individuals, and 70% of lower-middle-income individuals own a cell phone. However, this is lowered to 47% for low-income individuals, which motivates many non-profits and governmental programs to provide free and/or donated cell phones to people in vulnerable groups. [1] https://www.itu.int/itu-d/reports/statistics/2023/10/10/ff23-mobile-phone-ownership/ https://www.itu.int/itu-d/reports/statistics/2023/10/10/ff23...
- illwrks 3y agoFor me, it was visiting my friends house around 95, seeing him go to a website print off an exotic paper airplane design and then make it. My mind was blown, such a simple exercise has had such a massive impact on my relationship with computers.
- heikkilevanto 3y ago418 I'm a teapot
- teaearlgraycold 3y agoI’m getting a single-origin-request-security error.
- RockRobotRock 3y agoCSP, CORS, HSTS? Sounds like a pretty bad dream. Come on, we have sites to hack together with jQuery and PHP.
- timeagain 3y agoFor those not in on the joke, here’s the April fools RFC it refers to [1] “Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol (HTCPCP/1.0)” [1] https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2324 https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc2324
- ChrisArchitect 3y agoRelated discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36090344 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36090344
- triyambakam 3y agoAmazing how wanting to avoid an empty coffee pot led to the invention of the webcam. I had no idea.
- jedc 3y agoI got to know Quentin Stafford-Fraser a bit when I was at Cambridge. He's a really down-to-earth guy who was working on all sorts of interesting projects. He's got more details on the whole Trojan Room Coffee Pot experience on his blog: https://quentinsf.com/coffeepot/ https://quentinsf.com/coffeepot/
- JR1427 3y agoI also recently got to know him, and can confirm the above! We got to know each other because of our interest in small sailing boats.
- mkii 3y ago30 years ago. I wonder what will happen in the next 30.
- doublerabbit 3y agoA pair of hoverboots would be nice.
- BirAdam 3y agoMore likely we will just have iterative improvements over what already exists, more things uselessly connected to the internet, and maybe better batteries. I’d love something crazy, but… not likely.
- wharvle 3y agoMore things people actually like doing will lose both social and economic value outside the very top tiers of skill, and become quirky hobbies you mostly do alone for yourself.
- rvba 3y agoCybernetic implants?
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- threeio 3y agoReminds me of the coke machine at the computer science house at RIT https://www.rit.edu/news/recognition-historic-hack-leads-coke-and-smile https://www.rit.edu/news/recognition-historic-hack-leads-cok...
- andersrs 3y agoWikipedia's e-begging banner is quite over the top considering only a fraction of the funds are spent on hosting costs.
- hammyhavoc 3y agoAt this point, most consumer devices should ship with a copy of Wikipedia out of the box that then gets updated (considering Wikipedia's compressed dataset is only 19GB!). Either that or they need a P2P CDN. To be honest, I'd rather self-host my copy of Wikipedia in my own container on my own server, and fetch/push updates accordingly with other peers if I couldn't have it on-device for any reason. http://xowa.org/home/wiki/Help/Download_XOWA.html http://xowa.org/home/wiki/Help/Download_XOWA.html looks interesting.
- genter 3y agoI find it mighty interesting that uBlock Origin doesn't hide it.
- phreeza 3y agoDoesn't that depend on your filter list?
- galaxyLogic 3y agoI remember all those moments lost in wonder that we'll never find again - Roxy Music
- mark_undoio 3y agoI worked in a room in the new Computer Laboratory building, in which "can we throw out this random old coffee machine, or is it history?" was a real question. It definitely wasn't the first Trojan Room coffee machine but whether it was one of the family was an open question.