Computer technology now moves so fast it's hard to remember life before the internet. But just 19 years ago, at the beginning of the nineties, the fledgling world wide web had no search engines, no social networking sites, and no webcam.
The scientists credited with inventing the first webcam, thereby launching the revolution that would bring us video chats and live webcasts, stumbled upon the idea in pursuit of something far more old-fashioned: hot coffee.
As computer geeks at the University of Cambridge beavered away on research projects at the cutting edge of technology, one piece of equipment was indispensable to the entire team, the coffee percolator.
"One of the things that's very, very important in computer science research is a regular and dependable flow of caffeine," explains Dr. Quentin Stafford-Fraser.
But the problem for scientists was that the coffee pot was stationed in the main computer lab, known as the Trojan room, and many of the researchers worked in different labs and on different floors.
"They would often turn up to get some coffee from the pot, only to find it had all been drunk," Dr. Stafford-Fraser remembers.