Trojan Room Coffee Pot
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
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.
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.
Based on your username, I think we were born in the same year :-)
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.
Now, cell phones are almost everywhere.
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...
He's got more details on the whole Trojan Room Coffee Pot experience on his blog: https://quentinsf.com/coffeepot/
It definitely wasn't the first Trojan Room coffee machine but whether it was one of the family was an open question.
“Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol (HTCPCP/1.0)”
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 looks interesting.
https://www.rit.edu/news/recognition-historic-hack-leads-cok...