Specialty coffee in Cambridge

The most famous coffee in Cambridge was poor fresh from the brew and undrinkable from the bottom of the pot. In 1991 fifteen computer scientists at the university laboratory had had enough of climbing the stairs to a shared filter machine that the night owls emptied before everyone else. They pointed a camera at the pot, and so the world's first webcam was born: a grey 128 by 128 pixel image, refreshed three times a minute. Millions of people watched it, and when the feed was switched off in 2001 the pot itself went for 3,350 pounds on eBay - its creator summed up all that fame with the remark that it had not made the coffee any better.